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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr 



BY JOHN DAVIDSON 



Plays 

Ballads and Songs 

New Ballads 

Fleet Street Eclogues 

Godfrida 

The Last Ballad and Other Poems 

A Rosary 

Holiday and Other Poems 

Selected Poems 

A Random Itinerary 

Self's the Man 

The Knight of the Maypole 

The Testament of a Vivisector 

The Testament of a Man Forbid 

The Testament of an Empire Builder 

The Theatrocrat 

Mammon and His Message 

The Triumph of Mammon 



FLEET STREET 

and other poems 



By 

JOHN DAVIDSON 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS 

1909 



Copyright IQOQ 
by Mitchell Kennerley 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cooics Received 

JUN 3 IBOi^ 

^ CcpyriJfit tntry „ 



The time has come to make an end. There are 
several motives. I find my pension is not enough; 
I have therefore still to turn aside and attempt 
things for which people will pay. My health also 
counts. Asthma and other annoyances I have tol- 
erated for years; but I cannot put up with cancer. 

I thought this might be my last book, and in- 
tended five poems, " Cain," " Judas," " Caesar Bor- 
gia," " Calvin," and " Cromwell " under the gen- 
eral title, ''When God Meant God," to be the 
principal contents. " Cain " Is the only one of 
these poems which I have written. I should have 
concluded the volume with a second Testament In 
my own person. Insisting that men should no longer 
degrade themselves under such appellations as 
Christian, Mohammedan, Agnostic, Monlst, etc. 
Men are the Universe become conscious: the sim- 
plest man should consider himself too great to be 
called after any name. 

J. D. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

FLEET STREET 1 

SONG II 

THE CRYSTAL PALACE 13 

RAILWAY stations: 2$ 

LONDON BRIDGE 

LIVERPOOL STREET 

IN THE CITY 43 

CAIN 45 

ECLOGUES 61 

THE FEAST OF ST. HILARY 

ST. VALENTINE^S DAY 

SNOW 75 

THE TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMON SIMPLEX CONCERNING 

AUTOMOBILISM 79 

THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 88 

THE LUTANIST 92 

ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT 95 

TWO DOGS 96 

THE WASP lOI 

THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 103 

THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD I07 

ROAD AND RAIL 112 

SONG FOR THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF MAY . . . . 11 8 



FLEET STREET 

Wisps and rags of cloud In a withered sky, 
A strip of pallid azure, at either end, 
Above the Ludgate obelisk, above 
The Temple griffin, widening with the width 
Below, and parallel with the street that counts 
Seven hundred paces of tesselated road 
From Ludgate Circus west to Chancery Lane: 
By concrete pavement flanked and precipice 
Of windowed fronts on this side and on that, 
A thoroughfare of everything that hastes, 
The sullen tavern-loafers notwithstanding 
And hawkers in the channel hunger-bit. 

Interfluent night and day the tides of trade, 
Labour and pleasure, law and crime, are sucked 
From every urban quarter: through this strait 
All business London pours. Amidst the boom 
And thud of wheel and hoof the myriad feet 
Are silent save to him who stands a while 
And hearkens till his passive ear, attuned 
To new discernment like an erudite 
Musician's, which can follow note by note 
The part of any player even In the din 



2 FLEET STREET 

And thrashing fury of the noisiest close 
Orchestral, hears chromatic footsteps throb 
And tense susurrant speech of multitudes 
That stride In pairs discussing ways and means, 
Or reason with themselves in single file 
Advancing hardily on ruinous 
Events; and should he listen long there comes 
A second-hearing like the second-sight 
Diviners knew, or as the runner gains 
His second-breath; then phantom footsteps fell, 
And muffled voices travel out of time: 
Alsatians pass and Templars; stareabouts 
For the new motion of Nineveh; morose 
Or jolly tipplers at the Bolt-in-Tun, 
The Devil Tavern; Johnson's heavy tread 
And rolling laughter; Drayton trampling out 
The thunder of Agincourt as up and down 
He paces by St. Dunstan's; Chaucer, wroth. 
Beating the friar that traduced the State; 
And more remote, from centuries unknown, 
Rumour of battle, noises of the swamp, 
The gride of glacial rock, the rush of wings. 
The roar of beasts that breathed a fiery air 
Where fog envelops now electric light, 
The music of the spheres, the humming speed 
Centrifugal of molten planets loosed 
From pregnant suns to find their orbits out. 
The whirling spindle of the nebulae. 



FLEET STREET 3 

The rapture of ethereal darkness strung 
Illimitable in eternal space. 

Fleet Street was once a silence in the ether. 

The carbon, iron, copper, silicon, 

Zinc, aluminium vapours, metalloids, 

Constituents of the skeleton and shell 

Of Fleet Street — of the woodwork, metalwork, 

Brickwork, electric apparatus, drains 

And printing-presses, conduits, pavement, road — 

Were at the first unelemented space, 

Imponderable tension in the dark 

Consummate matter of eternity. 

And so the flesh and blood of Fleet Street, nerve 

And brain infusing life and soul, the men. 

The women, woven, built and kneaded up 

Of hydrogen, of azote, oxygen. 

Of carbon, phosphorus, chlorine, sulphur, iron. 

Of calcium, kalium, natrum, manganese, 

The warm humanities that day and night 

Inhabit and employ it and inspire, 

Were in the ether mingled with it, there 

Distinguished nothing from the road, the shops. 

The drainpipes, sewage, sweepings of the street: 

Matter of infinite beauty and delight 

Atoning offal, filth and all offence 

With soul and intellect, with love and thought; 

Matter whereof the furthest stars consist, 



4 FLEET STREET 

And every Interstellar wilderness 
From galaxy to galaxy, the thin 
Imponderable ether, matter's ghost, 
But matter still, substance demonstrable 
Being the icy vehicle of light. 

Flung off in teardrops spirally, or cast 
In annular fission forth like Saturn's hoops, 
Earth and the planets girdled solar space. 
The offspring and the suburbs of the sun. 
In rings or drops — the learned are unresolved 
How planets and their satellites arrive; 
But vision, vouching both, is more obsessed 
By Saturn's way of circles here at hand. 
Saturn has uttered many moons; his rings 
May be the last abortive birth of powers 
Luniparous unmatched in heaven ; or else 
These still-born undeveloped satellites 
Denote an overweening confidence 
Determined, risking all, on something new. 
Having outstretched spirally and well 
A brilliant series of customary moons, 
The hazardous and genial orb began 
A segregation annular instead. 
Attempting boldly the impossible, 
Thus to become the wonder of the skies 
For ever hampered with the rings we see. 
Stupendous error still eclipses net 



FLEET STREET 5 

Achievement; as In art the SIstlne roof 
Sublimely figured, or hardihood In war 
That wastes a troop for glory, or as earth 
In sheer terrestrial wantonness flung up 
The Marlpesan Vale, so In the skies 
The most enchanting vision of the night, 
Our belted Saturn shines, extravagance 
Celestial jewelled with its dazzling fault. 

Now, In the ether with all the universe, 

And In the nebula of air our scheme, 

Fleet Street and Saturn's rings were Interfused 

One mass of molecules being set apart 

For the high theme of wonder and the butt 

Of speculation, and the other doomed, 

Although the most renowned throughout the 

world, 
To be a little noisy London street. 
How think we then? The metal, stone and lime, 
Brick, asphalt, wood, the matter that renews 
The shell of Fleet Street, does It still begrudge 
The luminous zones with which it once was blent 
Their lofty glory? Or must the carapace 
Of Fleet Street, welded of the self-same stuff 
As man, be utterly oblivious? Thought 
And passion, envy, joy, are these unfelt 
By carbon, iron, azote, oxygen. 
And other liberal substances that know, 



6 FLEET STREET 

Rejoice and suffer In mankind, when power 

Selective turns them into street? Things wrought 

By us, are they, too, psychophysical? 

Do these piled storeys and purlieus quaint of square 

And alley envy Saturn's belts — a brief. 

Not outwardly distinguished urban street 

Upon a planet only remarkable 

Among the spheres for Insignificance, 

And they so lovely and unparagoned 

A thousand million of mundane miles away? 

Are able editors, leader-writers, apt 

Telegraphists and printers, the only soul 

In Fleet Street, they, its only consciousness? 

Perhaps the bricks remember. Who can tell 

When filthy fog comes down and lights are out, 

Machinery still, and traffic at the ebb. 

If Idle streets with time to meditate 

Resent enforced passivity? I think 

The admirable patience of the bricks 

May fail them of a Sunday. Imagine it: 

To be for ages unalterable brick. 

Sans speech or motion, nameless In a wall 

Among a million bricks alike unknown! 

I think the splendid patience of the bricks 
Gives out In darkness and foul weather, even 
To the length of envying the wonderful 
Exalted destiny of Saturn's belts; 



FLEET STREET 7 

And then I long to tell them, if I could, 

How much more happy their condition is 

Than that of rubbish revolving endlessly 

In agonies of impotent remorse 

About the planet it deserted. Thus 

Should I exhort them: — ''Bricks, beloved bricks, 

My brethren of the self-same ether bred, 

I hold it very beautiful of you 

To think so handsomely of Saturn's rings, 

Your old companions in the nebula; 

But I can tell you and I'll make you know, 

Your fate is no inferior to theirs. 

These seeming jewelled zones that shine so bright 

Are the mere wreck of matter, broken bits. 

Detached and grinding beaches of barren rock 

Hung up there as a menace and a sign; 

Circular strips of chaos unredeemed, 

Whirling in madness of oppugnant powers. 

Whether his rings are Saturn's own attempt. 

Abnormal and abortive, a brilliant ninth 

Consummate moon to utter, or likelier still, 

A leash of runaway material tides 

That mutinously left their native orb 

In molten youth to show all other stars 

The real and only way to shine, and failed 

Inevitably, being immature. 

They are, beyond all doubt, unhappy zones. 

Forlorn, remorseful, useless and ashamed. 



8 FLEET STREET 

Most beautiful, I grant you; beautiful 

And useless, like all art: their fate it is 

To be an agony of beauty, art 

Inutile, unavailing, misconceived. 

But you, most genial, intellectual bricks, 

Most dutiful and most important, you 

Are indispensable, an integral 

Component of the world's most famous street. 

Within your wholesome and convenient bield 

The truest miracle is daily done. 

" Never forget that men have tamed and taught 
The lightning; clad it in a livery known 
As news; and that without your constant aid 
Our modern, actual magic, black and white, 
Momentous mystery of telegraphy. 
Resounding press, accomplished intellects 
And pens expert would be impossible. 
Take down the walls your myrmidons compose, 
And Fleet Street, soul and body, ceases — fog 
Unoccupied, wind, city sunshine sparse 
And pallid claiming all the room that now. 
Enclosed, accoutred, functioned, named and known, 
Serves as the Dionysius' ear of the world. 
Honour and excellence and praise are yours; 
Be satisfied; be glad." 

But all the bricks, 



FLEET STREET 9 

O'erburdened and begrimed, in chorus sighed, 
And as one brick, " Upon my cubical 
Content, and by our common mother, I 
Had rather shine, a shard of chaos, set 
In Saturn's glistering rings, the exquisite 
Enigma of the night, than be the unnamed, 
Unthought-of copestone or foundation — stone 
Of any merely world-distinguished street." 

Applauding the ambition of the bricks, 
I felt, I also, I would rather share 
Dazzling perdition with material wreck 
Suspended in majestic agony 
About the withered loins of some undone 
Wide-circling planet for the universe 
To see, than live the dull life of a baked 
Oblength of tempered clay, year in year out 
Unnoticed In a murky, mundane street; 
But recollecting that the bricks were bricks 
And not a planetary wonder, what 
Event soe'er awaits the world and time, 
I reassured them : " Gallant souls," I cried, 
" Noble and faithful bricks, be not dismayed ! 
I hear the shapeless fragments that make up 
Aesthetic marvel in Saturn's girdles sigh 
Disconsolately, as they chafe and grind 
Each other, — Such an enviable fate 
As that of any single solid brick 



lo FLEET STREET 

In Fleet Street, London, well and truly laid, 

A moulded, tempered, necessary brick 

In that most famous faubeurg of the world. 

Exceeds our merits! Could we but attain 

The crude integrity of commonplace 

Cohesion even in the most exhausted, most 

Decrepit, ruinous, forgotten orb 

In some back alley of the Milky Way 

How happy we should be! Remember, bricks, 

Neither success nor failure envy spares: 

Use envies art; art envies use. These moods 

Will come, but regular bricks like you transcend 

Them always. Be courageous; be yourselves, 

Be proud of your telluric destiny." 

With that the bricks took heart: " Why, so vjt are," 
They said, " the ear of England ! Let us be 
Old England's ear ! " And revolution beat 
In smothered cries and muffled fusillades 
Upon the trembling tympanal; empires 
At war thridded the sounding labyrinth 
With cannon; loyal peoples through the sea 
And through the air by auditory nerves 
Electric from the quarters of the earth 
And from a hundred isles, their homage sent 
With whispered news of aspirations, deeds. 
Achievements to the Mother of Nations, she 
Whose ever vigilant, clairaudient ear 
Is Fleet Street. 



SONG 

Closes and courts and lanes, 

Devious, clustered thick, 
The thoroughfare, mains and drains. 

People and mortar and brick, 
Wood, metal, machinery, brains, 
Pen and composing stick: 

Fleet Street, but exquisite flame 

In the nebula once ere day and night 
Began their travail, or earth became, 
And all was passionate light. 

Networks of wire overland. 

Conduits under the sea. 
Aerial message from strand to strand 

By lightning that travels free, 
Hither in haste to hand 
Tidings of destiny 

These tingling nerves of the world's affairs 

Deliver remorseless, rendering still 
The fall of empires, the price of shares, 
The record of good and ill. 

Tidal the traffic goes 

Citywards out of the town; 

II 



13 SONG 

Townwards the evening ebb o'erflows 

This highway of old renown, 
When the fog-woven curtains close, 
And the urban night comes down, 

Where souls are spilt and intellects spent 

O'er news vociferant near and far. 
From Hesperus hard to the Orient, 
From dawn to the evening star. 

This is the royal refrain 

That burdens the boom and the thud 
Of omnibus, mobus, wain, 

And the hoofs on the beaten mud, 
From the Griffin at Chancery Lane 
To the portal of old King Lud — 
Fleet Street, diligent night and day, 

Of news the mart and the burnished hearth. 
Seven hundred paces of narrow way, 
A notable bit of the earth. 



THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

Contraption, — that's the bizarre, proper slang, 

Eclectic word, for this portentous toy, 

The flying-machine, that gyrates stiffly, arms 

A-kimbo, so to say, and baskets slung 

From every elbow, skating in the air. 

Irreverent, we; but Tartars from Thibet 

May deem Sir Hiram the Grandest Lama, deem 

His volatile machinery best, and most 

Magnific, rotatory engine, meant 

For penitence and prayer combined, whereby 

Petitioner as well as orison 

Are spun about in space: a solemn rite 

Before the portal of that fane unique, 

Victorian temple of commercialism, 

Our very own eighth wonder of the world, 

The Crystal Palace. 

So sublime! Like some 
Immense crustacean's gannoid skeleton. 
Unearthed, and cleansed, and polished! Were it so 
Our paleontological respect 

Would shield it from derision: but when a shed. 
Intended for a palace, looks as like 
The fossil of a giant myriapod! .... 

13 



14 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

'Twas Isabey — sarcastic wretch! — who told 
A young aspirant, studying tandem art 
And medicine, that he certainly was born 
To be a surgeon: ** When you try," he said, 
" To paint a boat you paint a tumour." 

No 
Idea of Its purpose, and no word 
Can make your glass and Iron beautiful. 
Colossal ugliness may fascinate 
If something be expressed ; and time adopts 
Ungalnllest stone and brick and ruins them 
To beauty; but a building lacking life, 
A house that must not mellow or decay? — 
'TIs nature's outcast. Moss and lichen? Stains 
Of weather? From the first Nature said "No! 
Shine there unblessed, a witness of my scorn! 
I love the ashlar and the well-baked clay: 
My seasons can adorn them sumptuously: 
But you shall stand rebuked till men ashamed, 
Abhor you, and destroy you and repent!" 

But come : here's crowd ; here's mob ; a gala day ! 
The walks are black with people: no one hastes; 
They all pursue their purpose business-like — 
The polo-ground, the cycle track; but most 
Invade the palace glumly once again. 
It is " again " ; you feel it In the air — 
Resigned habitues on every hand: 



THE CRYSTAL PALACE 15 

And yet agog; abandoned, yet concerned! 
They can't tell why they come; they only know 
They must shove through the holiday somehow. 

In the main floor the fretful multitude 
Circulates from the north nave to the south 
Across the central transept — swish and tread 
And murmur, like a seaboard's mingled sound. 
About the sideshows eddies swirl and swing: 
Distorting mirrors; waltzing-tops — ^wherein 
Couples are wildly spun contrariwise 
To your revolving platform; biographs. 
Or rifle-ranges; panoramas: choose! 

As stupid as it was last holiday? 

They think so, — every whit! Outside, perhaps? 

A spice of danger in the flying-machine? 

A few who passed that whirligig, their hopes 

On higher things, return disconsolate 

To try the Tartar's volant oratory. 

Others again, no more anticipant 

Of any active business in their own 

Diversion, joining stalwart folk who sought 

At once the polo-ground, the cycle-track, 

Accept the ineludlble; while some 

(Insidious anti-climax here) frequent 

The water-entertainments — shallops, chutes 

And rivers subterrene: — thus, passive, all, 



i6 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

Like savages bewitched, submit at last 
To be the dupes of pleasure, sadly gay — 
Victims, and not companions, of delight. 

Not all! The garden-terrace: — hark, behold. 

Music and dancing! People by themselves 

Attempting happiness! A box of reeds — 

Accordion, concertina, seraphine — 

And practised fingers charm advertent feet! 

The girls can dance, but, O their heavy-shod 

Unwieldy swains! — No matter: — hatless heads, 

With hair undone, eyes shut and cheeks aglow 

On blissful shoulders lie: — such solemn youths 

Sustaining ravished donahs! Round they swing, 

In time or out, but unashamed and all 

Enchanted with the glory of the world. 

And look! — Among the laurels on the lawns 

Torn coats and ragged skirts, starved faces flushed 

With passion and with wonder! — hid away 

Avowedly; but seen — and yet not seen! 

None laugh ; none point ; none notice : multitude 

Remembers and forgives; unwisest love 

Is sacrosanct upon a holiday. 

Out of the slums. Into the open air 

Let loose for once, their scant economies 

Already spent, what was there left to do? 

O sweetly, tenderly, devoutly think. 

Shepherd and Shepherdess In Arcady! 



THE CRYSTAL PALACE 17 

O heavy shower; the Palace fills; begins 

The business and the office of the day, 

The eating and the drinking — only real 

Enjoyment to be had, they tell you straight 

Now that the shifty weather fails them too. 

But what's the pother here, the blank dismay? 

Money has lost its value at the bars: 

Like tavern-tokens when the Boar's Head rang 

With laughter and the Mermaid swam in wine, 

Tickets are now the only currency. 

Before the buffets, metal tolles packed 

As closely as mosaic, with peopled chairs 

Cementing them, where damsels in and out 

Attend with food, like disembodied things 

That traverse rock as easily as air — 

These are the havens, these the happy isles! 

A dozen people fight for every seat — 

Without a quarrel, unturbently: O, 

A peaceable, a tame, a timorous crowd! 

And yet relentless: this they know they need; 

Here have they money's worth — some food, some 

drink ; 
And so alone, in couples, families, groups. 
Consuming and consumed — for as they munch 
Their victuals all their vitals ennui gnaws — 
They sit and sit, and fain would sit it out 
In tedious gormandize till firework-time. 
But business beats them: those who sit must eat. 



i8 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

Tickets are purchased at besieged Kiosks, 

And when their value's spent — ^with such a 

grudge ! — 
They rise to buy again, and lose their seats; 
For this is Mob, unhappy locust-swarm, 
Instinctive, apathetic, ravenous. 

Beyond a doubt a most unhappy crowd! 
Some scores of thousands searching up and down 
The north nave and the south nave hungrily 
For space to sit and rest to eat and drink; 
Or captives in a labyrinth, or herds 
Imprisoned in a vast arena; here 
A moment clustered ; there entangled ; now 
In reaches sped and now in whirlpools spun 
With noises like the wind and like the sea, 
But silent vocally: they hate to speak: 
Crowd: Mob: a blur of faces featureless, 
Of forms inane; a stranded shoal of folk. 

Astounding in the midst of this to meet 
Voltaire, the man who worshipped first, who made 
Indeed, the only god men reverence now, 
Public Opinion. There he sits alert — 
A cast of Hordin's smiling philosophy. 
Old lion-fox, old tiger-ape — ^what names 
They gave him! — better charactered by one 
Who was his heir : ** The amiable and gay." 



THE CRYSTAL PALACE 19 

So said the pessimist who called life sour 

And drank It to the dregs. Enough: Voltaire — 

About to speak : hands of a mummy clutch 

The fauteuil's arms; he listens to the last 

Before reply ; one foot advanced ; a new 

Idea radiant in his wrinkled face. 

Lunch in the grill-room for the well-to-do, 
The spendthrifts and the connoisseurs of food — 
Gourmet, gourmand, bezonian, epicure. 
Reserved seats at the window? — Surely; you 
And I must have the best place everywhere. 
A deluge smudges out the landscape. Watch 
The waiters since the scenery's not on view. 
A harvest-day with them, our Switzers-knights 
Of the napkin ! How they balance loaded trays. 
And, though they push each other, spill no drop! 
And how they glare at lazy lunchers, snatch 
Unfinished plates sans " by your leave," and fling 
The next dish down, before the dazzled lout 
(The Switzer knows his man) has time to con 
The menu, every tip precisely gaged. 
Precisely earned, no service thrown away. 
Sign of an extra douceur, reprimand 
Is welcomed, and the valetudinous 
Voluptuary served devoutly: he 
With cauteries on his cranium; dyed moustache; 
Teeth like a sea-wolf's, each a work of art 



20 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

Numbered and valued singly; copper skin; 

And nether eyelids pouched: — why he alone 

Is worth a half-day's wage! Walters for him 

Are pensioners of indigestion, paid 

As secret criminals disburse blackmail, 

As Attic gluttons sacrificed a cock 

To i^sculaplus to propitiate 

Hygela — if the classic flourish serves! 

"Grilled soles?" — for us: — Kidneys to follow. — 

Now, 
Your sole, sir; eat it with profound respect. 
A little salt with one side: — scarce a pinch! 
The other side with lemon: — tenderly! 
Don't crush the starred bisection : — count the drops ! 
Those who begin with lemon miss the true 
Aroma: quicken sense with salt, and then 
The subtle, poignant, critic savour tunes 
The delicate texture of the foam-white fish, 
Evolving palatable harmony 
That music might by happy chance express. 
A crust of bread — (eat slowly: thirty chews, 
Gladstonian rumination) — to change the key. 
And now the wine — a well-decanted, choice 
Chateau, bon per; a decade old; not more. 
A velvet claret, piously unchilled. 
A boiled potato with the kidney . . . No! 
Barbarian! Vandal! Sauce? 'Twould ruin all! 



THE CRYSTAL PALACE 21 

The kidney's the potato's sauce. Perpend: 

You taste the esoteric attribute 

In food; and know that all necessity 

Is beauty's essence. Fill your glass: salute 

The memory of the happy neolith 

Who had the luck to hit on roast and boiled. 

Finish the claret. — Now the rain has gone 

The clouds are winnowed by the sighing south, 

And hidden sunbeams through a silver woof 

A warp of pallid bronze in secret ply. 

Cigars and coffee in the billiard-room. 

No soul here save the marker, eating chops; 

The waiter and the damsel at the bar, 

In listless talk. A most uncanny thing, 

To enter suddenly a desolate cave 

Upon the margent of the sounding Mob! 

A hundred thousand people, class and mass, 

In and about the palace, and not a pair 

To play a hundred up! The billiard-room's 

The smoking-room; and spacious too, like all 

The apartments of the Palace: — why 

Unused on holidays? The marker: aged; 

Short, broad, but of a presence reticent 

And self-respecting; not at all the type: — 

" O well," says he; " the business of the room 

Fluctuates very little, year in, year out. 

My customers are seasons mostly." One 



22 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

On the Instant enters: a curate, very much 

At ease in Zion — and in Sydenham. 

He tells too funny stories — not of the room: 

And talks about the stage. " In London now," 

He thinks, " the play's the thing." He undertakes 

To entertain and not to preach: you see, 

It's with the theatre and the music-hall, 

Actor and artiste, the parson must compete. 

Every bank-holiday and special day 

The Crystal Palace sees him. Yes; he feels 

His hands upon the public pulse on such 

Occasions. O, a sanguine clergyman! 

Heard In the blUIard-room the sound of Mob, 
Occult and ominous, besets the mind: 
Something gigantic, something terrible 
Passes without; repasses; lingers; goes; 
Returns and on the threshold pants In doubt 
Whether to knock and enter, or burst the door 
In hope of treasure and a living prey. 
The vainest fantasy! Rejoin the crowd: 
At once the sound depreciates. Up and down 
The north nave and the south nave hastily 
Some tens of thousands walk, silent and sad, 
A most unhappy people. — Hereabout 
Cellini's Perseus ought to be. Not that; 
That's stucco — and Canova's: a stupid thing: 
The face and posture of a governess — 



THE CRYSTAL PALACE 23 

A nursery governess who's had the nerve 
To pick a dead mouse up. It used to stand 
Beside the billiard-room, against the wall, 
A cast of Benvenuto's masterpiece — 
That came out lame, as he pretold, despite 
His dinner dishes in the foundry flung. 

They shift their sculpture here haphazard. — That? 

King Francis — by Clesinger: — on a horse. 

Absurd: most mounted statues are. — And this? 

Verrochio's Coleone. Not absurd: 

Grotesque and strong, the battle-harlot rides 

A stallion: fore and aft, his saddle, peaked 

Like a mitre, grips him as in a vice. 

In heavy armour mailed; his lifted helm 

Reveals his dreadful look; his brows are drawn; 

Four wrinkles deeply trench his muscular face; 

His left arm half -extended, and the reins 

Held carelessly, although the gesture's tense; 

His right hand wields a sword invisible; 

Remorseless pressure of his lips protrudes 

His mouth; he would decapitate the world. 

The light is artificial now; the place 
Phantasmal like a beach in hell where souls 
Are ground together by an unseen sea. 
A dense throng in the central transept, wedged 
So tightly they can neither clap nor stamp, 



24 THE CRYSTAL PALACE 

Shouting applause at something, goad themselves 

In sheer despair to think it rather fine: 

" We came here to enjoy ourselves. Bravo, 

Then! Are we not?" Courageous folk beneath 

The brows of Michael Angelo's Moses dance 

A Cakewalk in the dim Renascence Court. 

Three people in the silent reading-room. 

Regard us darkly as we enter: three 

Come in with us, stare vacantly about, 

Look from a window and withdraw at once. 

A drama; a balloon; a Beauty Show: — 

People have seen them doubtless; but none of those 

Deluded myriads walking up and down 

The north nave and the south nave anxiously — 

And aimlessly, so silent and so sad. 

The day wears; twilight ends; the night comes 

down. 
A ruddy targetlike moon in a purple sky, 
And the crowd waiting on the fireworks. Come: 
Enough of Mob for one while. This way out — 
Past Linacre and Chatham, the second Charles, 
Venus and Victory — and Sir William Jones 
In placid contemplation of a State! — 
Down the long corridors to the district train. 



RAILWAY STATIONS 
I 

LONDON BRIDGE 

Much tolerance and genial strength of mind 

Unbiased, witnesses who wish to find 

This railway-station possible at all 

Must cheerfully expend. Artistical 

Ideas wither here: a magic power 

Alone can pardon and in pity dower 

With fictive charm a structure so immane. 

How then may fancy, to begin with, feign 

An origin for such a roundabout 

Approach — so intricate, yet so without 

Intention, and so spanned by tenebrous 

And thundering viaducts? Grotesquely, thus 

One night the disposition of the ward 

Was shifted; for the streets with one accord, 

Enfranchised by a landslip, danced the hay 

And innocently jumbled up the way. 

And so we enter. Here, without perhaps, 

Except the automatic money-traps. 

Inside the station, everything so old, 

So inconvenient, of such manifold 

25 



26 RAILWAY STATIONS 

Perplexity, and, as a mole might see, 

So strictly what a station shouldn't be, 

That no Idea minifies Its crude 

And yet elaborate Ineptitude, 

But some such fancied cataclysmal birth: — 

Out of the nombles of the martyred earth 

This old, unhappy terminus was hurled 

Back from a day of small things when the world 

At twenty miles an hour still stood aghast. 

And thought the penny post mutation vast 

As change Itself. Before the Atlantic race 

Developed turblned speed; before life's pace 

Was set by automobllism ; before 

The furthest stars came thundering at the door 

To claim close kindred with the sons of men; 

Before the lettered keys outsped the pen; 

Ere poverty was deemed the only crime 

Or wireless news annihilated time. 

Divulged now by an earthquake In the night, 

This ancient terminus first saw the light. 

A natural magic having gravely made 
This desperate station possible, delayed 
No longer by Its character uncouth. 
The Innocent adventurer, seeking truth 
Imaginative, if it may be, plays 
His vision, penetrant as chemic rays, 



RAILWAY STATIONS ^^ 

Upon the delta wide of platforms, whence 
Discharges into London's sea, immense 
And turbulent, a brimming human flood, 
A river inexhaustible of blood 
That turns the wheels, and by a secret, old 
As labour, changes heart-beats into gold 
For those that toil not: all the gutters run. 
Houses are daubed, with it; and moon and sun 
Splashed as they spin. And yet this human tide. 
As callous as the glaciers that glide 
A foot a day, but as a torrent swift, 
Sweeps unobservant save of time — for thrift 
Or dread disposes clockwards every glance — 
Right through a station which a seismic dance 
Chimerical alone can harmonize 
Even in imagination's friendly eyes. 

Clearly a brimming tide of mind as well 
As blood, whose ebb and flow is buy and sell. 
Engulfed by London's storm and stress of trade 
Before it reached the civic sea, and made 
Oblivious, knowing nought terrestrial 
Except that time is money, and money all. 

Or when a portly dealer, well-to-do. 
Chances to see it as he passes through. 
Or boy or girl not get entirely swamped 
In way and means and business of accompt, 



28 RAILWAY STATIONS 

About the many-platformed embouchure 
And utterance of suburban life obscure 
A liberal oeillade tosses, with a note 
Chromatic, crimson van and crimson coat, 
The parcel-post, and many a crimson shrine 
Of merchandise mechanical combine 
To reassure them as a point of war 
Inspires the soldier; for the cannon's roar, 
The trumpet's blast, the thunder of the drum, 
Are crimson motives; and the city's hum. 
The noise of battle, and a ruddy sky 
May echo in the selfsame harmony. 

Save when the glance of age whose brisk affairs 

Look up on 'Change, of youth untouched by care's 

Inhibitory wand that palsies thought, 

No other gracious sign appears, nor aught 

Distinctly personal, innate or earned. 

In the dull, rapid passage of concerned 

Expression from the station to the street, 

Until a dire resemblance of defeat 

In one set visage hides the common face: 

Such a premonstrant shadow of disgrace, 

Such grey alarm, such sickening for despair 

Is only seen in urban crowds, for there 

The broken broker feels himself alone, 

Exempt from scrutiny, even of his own 



Railway stations 20 

Protean introspection, and as free 

As genius, or as fallen spirit, to be 

The very image of the thing he is — 

A figure on the brink of the abyss, 

The failure and the scapegoat of the mart. 

The loser in the game, the tragic part 

Wherein some novice mastered by the play 

Without rehearsal triumphs every day. 



II 

LIVERPOOL STREET 

Through crystal roofs the sunlight fell, 
And pencilled beams the gloss renewed 
On iron rafters balanced well 
On iron struts; though dimly hued, 
With smoke o'erlaid, with dust endued, 
The walls and beams like beryl shone; 
And dappled light the platforms strewed 
With yellow foliage of the dawn 
That withered by the porch of day's divan. 

The fragrant, suave, autumnal air 
A dulcet Indian summer breathed, 
Able to reach the inmost lair 
Unclean of London's interwreathed 
And labyrinthine railways, sheathed 
In annual increments of soot: 
Memories of regions parked and heathed, 
Of orchards lit with golden fruit 
Attuned October's subterranean lute. 

But orchards lit with golden lamps, 
Or purple moor, or nutbrown stream, 
30 



RAILWAY STATIONS 31 

Or mountains where the morn encamps 
Frequent no station-loafer's dream: 
A breed of folk forlorn that seem 
The heirs of disappointment, cast 
By fate to be the preacher's theme, 
To hunger daily and to fast 
And sink to helpless indigence at last. 

From early morn they hang about 
The book-stall, the refreshment-room; 
They pause and think, as if in doubt 
Which train to go by; now assume 
A jaunty air, and now in gloom 
They take the platform for a stage 
And pace it, meditating doom — 
Their own, the world's; in baffled rage 
Condemning still the imperceptlve age. 

Like aromatic wine that does 
As wine will do w^ith living clay, 
The wonderful anachronous. 
Autumnal — summertidal day 
Seduced a laboured soul to play 
The idler: — (one who could rehearse 
Unheard-of things; whose thoughts were grey 
With travail, and whose reason scarce 
Escaped the onslaught of the universe: 



32 RAILWAY STATIONS 

Yet one who waged an equal strife, 
And, unsubdued, beyond the sad 
Horizon of terrestrial life 
In noisome cloud and thunder clad, 
And death-cries of the past that bade 
Repent, above the galaxy 
Enthroned himself; and, sane or mad. 
Magnanimously claimed to be 
The soul and substance of eternity). 

He, then, to whom all things were great 
By virtue of his native power, 
Applauded autumn's sumptuous state, 
And meant to share her golden hour — 
Her kiss that moved the faded flower 
To blush again, the haunting time 
And witchcraft of her Inmost bower, 
Restoring for an afternoon 
The bosom and the fragrant skirts of June. 

He booked to Epping Street. The train 
Drew out, and clanking Idly, strayed 
Along the line with dull refrain 
That mocked the exigence of trade. 
At Woodford milkmen long delayed 
The journey; and at Snaresbrook noise 
Broke out, and passengers inveighed 
Against the line: such bitter joys 
Two-faced occasion brings. At Theydon Bois, 



RAILWAY STATIONS 33 

At Chigwell Lane and Loughton, all 
Complacent forest hamlets, folk, 
Since chance itself might not forestall 
Their sylvan leisure, tarrying, spoke 
On footboards poised ; and this one's joke. 
And that one's parting comment, wound 
A strand of laughter through the smoke 
And pulsing steam, whose rhythmic sound 
With pliant wheels a thundrous music ground. 

From Epping Street, w^here half a score 
Inviting hostels lie between 
The upper forest and the lower, 
The bounds and metes of that demesne 
That once from Waltham surged in green 
Luxuriance to the northern tide, 
The lover of the fall's serene 
Miraculous renascence hied 
By turnpike, woodland path and forest-ride. 

A purple haze that scarce could keep 
Diaphanous consistence spread 
Above the ridged perspective deep 
Of Epping Forest; overhead, 
With arabesque of shining thread 
As manifold as jewelled dyes, 
In varied beauty interwed 
A snowy vapour damaskwise 
Endued the tenderest of turquoise skies. 



5+ RAILWAY STATIONS 

Ripples of cloud like silver strands 
Escalopcd by continual surge, 
The seaboard of fantastic lands, 
Defined the welkin's orient verge: 
He heard afar the airy dirge 
Of breaking billows, saw the foam 
In heaven mantle, spindrift scourge 
The zelnth, and their shadows roam 
Across the woods like coveys flying home. 

A herd of clouds with fleeces rent 
Flocked in the west; an aigret plumed 
The low-hung northern firmament; 
But in the south a shadow loomed 
Like chaos out of eld exhumed 
To re-engulf the world long lost 
In time; and yet the darkness bloomed 
With sprays of bronze like briars tossed. 
With hidden flower and fruit of flame embossed. 

He heard the woodman's fateful strokes 
In Epping Thicket, blow on blow, 
Where spaciously the loftiest oaks 
In all the forest precincts grow. 
The rose, the bramble and the sloe 
Muffled the holly, hid the thorn; 
And berries blushed with diverse glow 
Of gradual colour like the morn, 
Whose changing hues the ravished east adorn. 



RAILWAY STATIONS 35 

In many a dome of russet green, 
Without a centre shaft to draw 
The branches round It, might be seen, 
Once more with tender-hearted awe. 
The burning bush religion saw — 
The nightshade's coral hanging free, 
The scarlet hip, the crimson haw. 
The swarthy bramble lovingly 
Enwreathed as in a myriad-minded tree. 

The bramble leaves, with iron mould 
Distained, like metal foliage glanced; 
The fluted beech, in ruddy gold 
Accoutred bravely, countenanced 
The yellow thorn, whose hue enhanced 
In turn the heather's rusty ore; 
The bracken, faded all, advanced 
Along the forest's pillared floor — 
A tawny tide upon an emerald shore. 

But eager frosts that braise and brand 
Autumnal foliage still delayed; 
Green was the forest, green the land, 
A fibrous sward, a toothsome blade: 
The cow-bells rang in every glade 
Their quaint memorial refrain, 
A ghostly sound by change inlaid; 
The year stood still; and summer fain 
As in her prime, usurped the world again. 



36 RAILWAY STATIONS 

The chrysosperm In sunbeams pent 
A largesse squandered. Rich as light 
Of rainbow brede, the forest-scent; 
And subtler, keener than the white 
Aroma of the stars at night 
That maddens lovers wandering late 
Betrothed in destiny's despite; 
As searching as the importunate 
And supersensuous ether uncreate. 

A doe stepped forth and pried about 
With wondering look and wtachful ear, 
Then vanished. Venturous birds burst out. 
As in the heyday of the year. 
With summer song in snatches, clear 
As water dropping In a well ; 
Harmonious from a turret near 
Replied a silvery vesper-bell; 
The braided light grew golden; evening fell. 

In Highbeach Holt, a place alone, 
A wonder of the world, antique 
Protected beeches straightly grown, 
Or pollarded of yore and meek 
Transmuters of the shapeless freak 
The Iron wrought throughout the years 
To symmetry, that all things seek 
Forever, they, the verderer's 
Most cherished vert In all his marks and meres. 



RAILWAY STATIONS 37 

Upon a forest fabric stood 
Three-piles of leaves and fruitful mast, 
That carpeted the upland wood 
And crypts and bowers, obscure and vast 
In the close twilight waning fast: 
Some scumbled moss, with here and there 
A stroke of scanty herbage, cast 
A chord of green, remarked and rare 
Among the russet spreading everywhere. 

All still and stately ancient trees, 
With stem erect and ample bole, 
Maintained their native majesties 
In leafy robe and verdant stole 
Invested, green from fork to poll; 
Old, gnarled and thundersmitten, some 
Uncouthly grew, the sylvan soul 
By brutal accident became 
A tortured wraith in hideous anguish dumb. 

The saplings flourished straight and tall 
Like living palisades a-row. 
Their lance-like stems in vertical, 
And rhythmic parallels below; 
Above like crayon lines that flow 
Obliquely through each other, swart 
Immingled boughs in writhen throe 
A cross-hatched canopy athwart 
The precinct flung and roofed and arboured court: 



3^ RAILWAY STATIONS 

A silence like the dead of night 
The ebon-pIUared emerald walls 
Immuned; a dusky latticed light 
Fulfilled the high-groined cloisters, halls, 
Occult recesses, wildwood stalls 
In glimmering chancel-aisles arrayed; 
And violet beams at intervals 
Illumined the forest-girdled glade 
Through rents and loopholes in the beechen shade. 

With hue and form so diverse stored, 
Beauty and wonder, vaulted space 
By fantasy alone explored, 
The solitude and rich embrace 
Soul-clasping of that silent place 
So sphered his vision, steeped his brain 
In dreams, that he beheld no trace 
Of mundane things, nor hint nor stain 
Of twilight or of night, until again 

He reached the city. Then and there 
A potent urban spell subdued 
The forest's, for the sorcerer 
Of sorcerers is multitude. 
Three railway-stations closely brood 
Together by the Bishop's Gate, 
That ancient, famous neighbourhood ; 
And nowhere more profoundly, late 
Or early, can the nameless sense of fate 



RAILWAY STATIONS 39 

In numbers Immanent be felt 
Than in these eastern haunts at night, 
Where eddying tumults surge and melt 
Like clouds beneath remorseless light 
In streets and garnished windows, bright 
As for some celebration night, 
While tides of transit at the height 
In rival modes of passage vie, 
And wheel and hoof and automobile ply. 

Barbaric shouts and shrieks he heard, 
Like cries of wrath or cries of ruth; 
But no one laughed or spoke a word; 
Master and man, and age and youth 
In purposeless, intense, uncouth 
Commotion seemed for ever lost. 
Save those that wooed in saddest sooth 
A hope forlorn. In all things crossed, 
And yet resolved to live at any cost. 

The gutter-merchants. At the kerb 
Fifty and five, a ghastly row, 
With faces hell could not perturb 
So rigid were they in their woe, 
Self-centred stood. Life's undertow 
Had dragged them down : a few were old, 
A few were young, though fallen so low; 
But most were in their prime: they sold 
Unnecessary trifles manifold. 



40 RAILWAY STATIONS 

A while he watched them wonderstruck ; 
And scornfully they watched again. 
Not there the undistinguished ruck 
And ordinary run of men! 
Their mystery seemed beyond his ken: 
What brought such mortals there, so strong, 
So resolute? How, where and when 
Had fortune thrust them forth among 
The sufferers unsalvable of wrong? 

Their eyes on fire, their wrinkles changed 
To shadowed sculpture in the brute 
Effulgence of the windows, ranged 
Together closely, foot by foot. 
Like giant marionettes, as mute. 
As quick and as mechanical. 
Fronting the shops, they made their suit 
By signs alone; and each and all 
Unhuman seemed, austere, asexual. 

And yet in faces drawn and starved 
Tlie tale of many a lingering fight 
With circumstance was deeply carved; 
Of hazardous attempts to smite 
A passage through the solid night 
The outcast beats his head against; 
To enter, maugre might and rights 
A huckstering world, alike incensed 
By challengers and suppliants, and fenced 



RAILWAY STATIONS 41 

About with adamantine hearts. 
He thought, " As well would It behove 
The morning to invade the marts; 
Or that the dawn should live and move 
Within an iceberg! Nought can prove 
More terrible than toil for hire, 
Or toil at all, to these; the groove, 
The settled habit men desire — 
They find it torture and the nether fire. 

" On every lip, on every brow 
I see their dreadful secret lurk: 
All work to them is thraldom now; 
They hate to work, they cannot work. 
This last expedient still they shirk, 
And every day resolve to fly 
From hell: — No hope, no fear, no quirk 
Of conscience, in the public eye 
Shall stand us there again who dare to die! 

" But all have made it up with fate 
Sincerely by the evening! Soon, 
Or when the Irksome night is late 
And In the west the wintry moon 
Disdains the city, or at noon 
When the huge welter of the day 
Goes thundering past them to a tune 
They cannot sing, the old dismay 
Victorious seems and death the only way. 



42 RAILWAY STATIONS 

" DIurnally recurrent strife ! 
Some carry poison; always there 
The silent river flows; now life, 
Now death, the makeweight of despair 
Determines; but the end is ne'er 
In doubt: — In utter obloquy. 
In utter woe, we greatly dare 
To live, since those alone are free 
Who keep the power to be or not to be. 

" Such is their dread, their awful lot — 
To live with palsied souls and numb 
Affections! Higher courage not 
With sound of prayer or sound of drum 
In battle or in martyrdom 
Was ever shown by saint or knight! 
They stand at gaze through wearisome 
Eternities, by ruthless light 
Betrayed and scorned and shuddered at, invite 

" The passers-by to spend the pence 
That keeps them tortured in the pit 
Wherein their supersubtle sense 
Entrapped them, and the fire their wit 
Prepared, their pride and passion lit! 
Only the miracle, mankind, 
Can face this hell of the unfit — 
Only the universe enshrined 
In lordly flesh and blood and lordly mind." 



IN THE CITY 

Is it heaven and its city-porch 
Or a ceiling high-hung of old 
With lacquer fumed and scrolled 
Of many a festal torch? 

High heaven it is, and the day 
With its London doom of smoke 
No storm can quite revoke, 
No deluge w^ash away. 

When their march and song grow mute 
In the city's labyrinth trapped. 
The Storms themselves are wrapped 
In draggled shrouds of soot. 

Whirlwinds by lightnings paced 
To run their wild career. 
With ragged gossamere 
Of fine-spun carbon laced. 

As soon as they quit the shires 
Are lost beyond all hail: 
The mightiest tempests quail 
In the midst of a million fires. 

43 



44 IN THE CITY 

But the heavens are clear to-day 
Though their London doom of smoke, 
No storm can quite revoke, 
No deluge wash away. 



CAIN 

My sons and daughters; children's children; Cain's 
Posterity: — God, what a multitude 
From one man's seed — hiding the sun! 
They stop the air, and make this cave a tomb 
Already! . . . What? I bade them? If I 

did, 
'Twas not to stifle me. Stand from the door! 
Let in the light, let in the breath, of heaven! 

Now^ I remember why I made them come. 
Carry me out among them. All the air 
That mantles earth invisibly, and fills 
The bosom of the world, would scarce sufliice 
To word with power the thing I have to tell. 

My sight grows keen again: I see them, — these 
The offspring of my loins: — Enoch and Irad, 
Sons and companions; generations; boys 
That promise to be great — Jabal and Jubal, 
And my namesake, Tubalcaln. My lusty men, 
My breeding women and my little ones, 
My maidens beautiful, my young men chaste, 
My blessing and God's curse be with you all. 

45 



4^ CAIN 

Lie down about me, stretched at length; behind 
There, sit or kneel; and let the standers ring 
Us closely round, that every one may hear. 

My children, I am dying. Very old 

Am I. A thousand storms have shaken all 

My members; and the moments, like a rain 

That never lessens, falling day and night 

Throughout the steadfast centuries, have cleansed 

My memory of the chances that befell: — 

Our sojourns and our warfare and our work. 

Our triumphs, travels, happinesses, pains. 

My own especial charge and vigilance 

For us and ours, as well as intimate 

Affection, privy thoughts and single life. 

From my remembrance like a landslip fall. 

Leaving the naked rock of that event 

Whereon our fate is founded. Many times 

I thought to tell you, many times put off. 

It may be said when I have made it known — 

Often I told myself so: — Had he kept 

His secret to himself ^ our folk, unswayed 

By knowledge, might have overborne divine 

Intention, and the tribal fate decreed. 

But I say, No. I fought God's will, and built 

A city east of Eden. Void it stands, — 

It, and the city, Enoch, which I named 

After my eldest born, — silent and void 



CAIN 47 

Except for beasts and birds: — you would not live 

In houses, rooted, impotent as trees. 

Why had God loosed you from the cumbering earth 

And given you pliant limbs if not to roam 

From place to place? Caves in the wilderness, 

And in the desert camps for sons of mine! 

God had ordained it; deftly given us limbs 

That he might curse us: — did we grow like trees 

Where had his fugitives and wanderers been? 

God cannot be escaped : He means that I 

Should tell you. Fables, whispered closely, hum 

About the watchfires ; and a lie believed 

May sow a tribal fate more terrible 

Than errantry like ours. This too, I know 

My children, — that I dare not, cannot, die 

Until I tell you: — and I wish to die, 

Being forewearied of the world and time. 

I had a brother, Abel, whom I loved 

As no man shall be loved by man again. 

Companions were we when the world was young. 

And only us of our nativity 

To love the other for the other's sake: 

Our gentle mates were second in our hearts. 

Younger than I, he was the hardier; 

And I in everything gave way, well pleased 

That he should still excel, — and with his pride 

In excellence well pleased. Our thoughts of God 



48 CAIN 

Alone divided us, as such thoughts will — 
Father from son, kindred from kindred, folk 
From folk, until the world or God shall cease. 

I dug and planted; studied nature's way; 

And out of meagre grasses fostered grain, 

Enhanced the zest, augmented and refined 

The substances of fruits and roots and herbs. 

My brother idled, angry in the sun 

And sullen in the shade. At times he gazed 

On Eden half a day in ecstacy; 

Or dark with sin heredltarj'', wrath 

And sorrow intermingled, frow^ned on heaven 

Until he fell down pulseless, breathless, dead 

It seemed, by fighting passions hacked and slain. 

In rarer moods he wrought with me, perturbed 

By mystery of the blossoms that unveiled 

Such tender beauty, and with fragrance bore 

The seed the earth enwombed: it maddened him 

To watch how nature did, to know the thing 

Achieved and not to understand: — " Shall folk. 

The human fruit of blossom.s that unite, 

Be in the earth enwombed and live again ? " 

" Not as the plants are we," I answered still 

His obdurate demand. " Released from earth. 

Our birth, our growth, our life are in the air, 

Though when we die the soil reclaims us: God 

Appointed it. But in our seed we live 



CAIN 49 

As blossoms do:" — an all-atoning truth 
That only tortured him. He knew no ease 
In life, no respite found from doubt and dread 
Except In force expended, powers employed. 
Loving the heats and dangers of the chase. 
Deep-bosomed, swift of foot, he overtook 
The leopard flying for life; the lion feared 
To meet him; from their bloody dens he dragged 
The fiercest beasts and killed them weaponless. 

At dawn upon an altar built of turf 
And grafted In the earth, I daily spread 
For God a grateful table, fruit and corn 
In season. But my brother worshipped not 
With me: — '' I serve the Lord by killing things," 
He told me w^hen I asked him how he praised 
The maker of the world. '* God's will It Is," 
He said, " that all his creatures should destroy 
Each other: hoofed-and-horned devour the herb 
Fattening themselves for f anged-and-clawed ; the 

night 
Devours the day; the day, the night; I kill 
All things that are — beasts, fishes, birds, grain, 

fruit; 
Darkness itself with fire I can dismember. 
God's will is light and darkness, life and death : 
Two utmost joys, to kill and to beget, 
I share with God, creator and destroyer.'* 



56 CAIN 

" But God is love," I said. " Seek not for God 
In bloodshed. In the rapture of desire, 
In busy peace of heart by day, in dreams 
By night that sweeten sleep with paradise 
Discover God." 

" No ; God is strength," he said. 
" Hunger and carnage, lust and strife are God 
Inspiring all His creatures, strong or weak, 
In their divine degree." 

" Save man ! " I cried, 
" Although with skins of slaughtered beasts we veil 
Our nakedness, against the weather pitch 
Pavilions in the desert, we devour 
No flesh, nor stain our lips with blood; the earth's 
Benignant bosom feeds us tenderly." 

" Like sheep and kine — big-bellied things, the prey 

Of lean ferocity! Since we can kill" . . . 

He looked at me askance, a splintered fire 

Burst from his eyes athwart the dawning thought; 

Unwonted laughter shimmered in his face. 

Like heat that vibrates from the sun-soaked earth 

And makes a presence of the throbbing air. 

** Since we can kill ? " I echoed, knowing well 
His dreadful meaning. " What you dare not speak 
You will not do ! " 



CAlK $t 

" The thoughts that teem with deeds 
Fulfil themselves unspoken. God delights 
To rend and tear, to lap the smoking blood. 
God's a voracious God; the uddered things 
And haunched, the sagging entrails are his prey 
Assigned ; the tiger and the lion, His fangs, 
His appetite and maw. Were we to dip 
Our mouths in blood, like those beloved beasts, 
It would rejoice the hungry heart of God. 
And for our own behoof, — if flesh of fruit, 
The blood of berries, mellow sap of pulse 
And marrow of the grain can nourish strength 
Like ours, what keener zest, what ampler might 
A more compact, a more essential fare 
Might goad our palates with and prime our nerves! 
The loins of timid things that chew the cud 
Mature the pasturage we cannot eat 
For our superior nurture. I shall flesh 
My appetite — God's appetite in me." 

" Not God's! " I cried in wrath. " The God of 

man 
Lions and tigers in his similitude 
Would never frame." 

" In whose resemblance, then ? 
Brother, God shaped his wanton, ravening beasts 
In likeness of his cruelty — the mark, 



S2 CAIN 

The very soul and character of God. 

So sure am I that God designed His men 

To feed on flesh and blood as lions do 

That I shall challenge it. You offer God 

The sweetness and the ripeness of the earth 

Upon your turfen table, and salute 

The dawn. To-morrow at your side 

I shall upon an altar built of stone — 

The monument of what must there befall — 

A living victim sacrifice, while both 

Entreat a sign from heaven, nor cease to pray 

Until God's will and pleasure are made known. 

How say you? Dare you put God to the test? " 

" In His great name! " I cried, assured that now 
The man I loved would know the heart of God, 
So human, so divine — as I believed. 

Wet with the vapour that involved the earth, 

A sheaf of corn across my shoulders slung, 

With apples in a basket in my right, 

And in my other hand a bunch of grapes, 

I climbed the hill before the dawn, and laid 

My offering on my altar, sure of heaven. 

My brother followed, leading In a withe, 

A white bull, whiter than the rolling fog 

That wreathed its horns. He spoke not ; nor did I. 

But when the touch of morning lit the crests 



CAIN S3 

Of Havilah o'erhanging Eden, doubt 
Assailed me suddenly. I crushed the grapes 
In eager hands, staining the golden corn. 
The ruddy fruit — a rite then first observed 
Unwittingly, for all my being shook 
With abject fear of God, unknown before, 
But soon about to overcast the world — 
Though not on us the woeful shadow lies: 
Accursed of God we earnestly disclaim 
The cowardice that hallows vengeful wrath 
The terror of the inconceivable. 

It was in ignorance I crushed the grapes, 
Inspired by God against my conscious will 
To pour out blood before Him. Yet I spoke 
My prayer — our prayer: — together children, pray 
Once more with me — with Cain before he dies: — 
" O God of men we thank Thee for the earth, 
For life and death, for labour and for rest. 
For day and night, for seasons, times and tides; 
Empower our souls with faith; direct our steps 
In ways of pleasantness and paths of peace; 
And thine shall be the praise for ever more. 
Creator of the world, the just, the true, 
The merciful, the gracious God of men." 

I made my Invocation, unaware 

How insolent it was; and on my knees 



54 CAIN 

Implored a token of acceptance. Through 
The valley rolled the mist; a pearly smoke 
O'ercanopied the guarded bowers, and depths 
Profound of sylvan shadow, that the day, 
Unveiling, deepened ; sundered mountain-tops, 
Pellucid in the crimson gorge of dawn. 
Above the earth like pendent meteors burned; 
The Pishon w^ound among the woods below, 
The mirror of the morning streaming blood, 
With amber and with ber>4-stone enchased. 
But God was silent and allowed no sign. 
Then as the sun surmounted Havilah, 
My brother, kneeling strongly on the bull's 
Ascendant shoulder, bore the creature down: 
His left hand gripped its under jaw, and bent 
Its tossing head backward and stretched its throat; 
His right implanted in its curded neck 
The ivory blade, that out he drew again 
Ensanguined all its length, swiftly and smooth 
As though the spouting blood had thrust it forth. 
His grip upon its muzzle choked the bull's 
Affrighted roar, his puissance overcame 
Its agony, and held it till it died, 
Upon the dripping altar offered up. 
Its milkwhite dewlap and its milkwhite flank 
With bloody foliage strown and flowers of death. 

Mastering his bosom as a rough-wrought sea 



CAIN 55 

Recovers tidal measure when the storm 

Desists, my brother tarried, vigilant 

To repossess himself; then stepping slow 

With majesty and grace unseen on earth 

Before that morn of world-transforming chance, 

He left the altar, and flung his looks aloft 

Where sumptuously the vintage of the east 

Empurpled all the peaks of Havilah, 

And westward where belated orbs of night, 

So limpid was the heaven-spanned firmament, 

Between Assyrian summits darkling swung 

Their crystal lamps. The beauty of the world 

Rebuked him for a moment — or I thought 

It did; the pause, the doubt, if doubt or pause 

Began, was seen by me, not felt by him. 

And died upon its birth. 

"Almighty God," 
With hardihood devout he said, " accept 
This blood that steams new-spilt, and this. Thy 

brute, 
New-slain to please Thee; and bestow a sign 
Of Thy acceptance that Thy men may know 
How strenuous, how absolute Thou art, 
A God alive, an active God, a God 
Delighting in a bloody sacrifice. 
As Thy ferocious creatures take delight 
In slaughter and the flesh of rams and bulls.** 



56 CAIN 

Forthwith while yet the coil of breath, that bore 

His supplicative arrogance, aspired 

Unseen in the unseen, the cloudless top 

And tented blue of heaven, disparting, showed 

As in a fruit that bursts, the sanguine seed 

And crimson heart of glory, lucid shapes 

Celestial and pavilions thronged with life, — 

A transient revelation, but beheld 

In vision still, as obvious as the sun. 

By my surviving eyes that wait on death. 

Heaven opened and heaven closed: adow^n the 

gulf 
Unmeasured and aerial steep of space 
A saffron flame, in figure like a frond 
The wind inwraps and tapers skywards, fell 
Directly on my brother's altar, lapped 
The hissing blood as with a hundred tongues. 
And, fawning o'er the carcase, burnt it up. 
Transfigured by acceptance of the blood 
He spilt, my brother laughed aloud, and called 
Exultantly on God. " Divine destroyer, 
Reveller in life and death, let me partake 
With Thee! " he cried. Dropping the ivory 

blade 
That broached the creature's life, before the fire 
Had licked the flesh from all the blackened ribs. 
He grasped a smouldering handful and scorched his 

mouth 



CAIN 57 

With God's accepted sacrifice. Appalled 

To see a man, my brother, taste the food 

Of savage brutes, my senses failed, my heart 

Stood still a space; then thundering in my ears 

A tide of passion swept me from myself, 

A thousand judgments like a gathered storm 

Burst in my mind: — " If God," I thought, and 

seized 
My brother's blade, " delights in blood of beasts. 
The blood of men should fill the cup divine 
With happiness ineffable." Straightway 
I flung an arm about my brother's neck. 
And drove the bloodstained ivory through his heart. 
He fell without a murmur: the breath of life 
Escaped his grinding teeth, his parted lips; 
The wonder in his eyes dismays me still, — 
And overwhelmed then. But when I looked 
To see the vaulted base of paradise 
Re-open, and a sheaf of fire descend, 
No fissure, chink or crevice, broke the blue 
Immensity that hid the infinite. 

Thus God refused my brother's blood — the man 
I loved, and killed that he might live divine 
Eternally, a part of God ; for that, 
Within the madness of the murder, sang 
Like music in a tempest. God preferred 
A bull's blood to my brother's: — still I think, 



58 CAIN 

Old, dying as I am, something went wrong 

In heaven. Howbelt when I saw him dead 

And unaccepted, not the saltest tear 

Assuaged the fiery horror of myself 

That melted all my strength: in thunder drops 

The sweat splashed from my brow; a core of pain 

Without remission rising In my gorge, 

Hot, hard and noisome sickened me; I beat 

My breast; I fell; I rose; I fled, and plunged 

In wooded darkness where the thicket wove 

A thorny canopy. My fate, my doom! — 

God had me there alone, unhelped by light. 

By power and beauty of the widespread world. 

Immediately the still and awful voice. 

Whose accents are omnipotence, besieged 

My soul and said, " Thy brother, where Is he? " 

I answered, as men answer God, at once, 

" I know not, I. Am I my brother's keeper?" 

''What hast thou done?" God said. "Thy 

brother's blood, 
That crieth from the ground, hath cursed the 

ground 
For thee. When thou shalt till the ground that 

oped 
Her mouth to drink thy brother's blood, poured by 

thy hand 
Henceforth it shall yield thee of her strength. 



CAIN 59 

A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be 
Upon the earth ! " 

I answered in the rapt 
Despair the presence and the ire of God 
Begat, " I know that my iniquity 
Can never be forgiven. Behold since Thou 
Hast reft from me the favour of the ground 
And turned Thy countenance away, and I 
Shall be a wanderer, it shall come to pass 
That whosoever findeth me shall slay me." 

" Therefore," said God, " whoever slayeth Cain 
On him a sevenfold vengeance shall be taken." 
With that God set His mark upon my brow, 
Which none behold unawed or look on twice. 

I have told the truth; no more remains to tell: 
God's curse is on us; and we make it do. 
Our errant life is not unhappy; fear. 
That harrows others, is to us unknown. 
Being close to God by reason of His curse. 
\ Sometimes I think that God Himself is cursed, 
(For all His things go wrong. We cannot guess; 
He is very God of God, not God of men: 
We feel His power. His inhumanity; 
Yet, being men, we fain would think Him good. 
Since in imagination we conceive 



6o CAIN 

A merciful, a gracious God of men, 
It may be that our prayer and innocent life 
Will shame Him into goodness in the end. 
Meantime His vengeance is upon us; so, 
My blessing and God's curse be with you all. 



ECLOGUES 

THE FEAST OF ST. HILARY 
Bertram. Lionel, Sandy. Cyril. Vivian. 

Bertram 
Your evolution, still so crude 

In civic life, prefers to sit 
In murky air of muslin stewed 

With soot and sulphur of the pit. 

Lionel 
Why, this is only London's own 

Appurtenance in Janiveer 
And winter months — a want of tone, 

A jaundice of the atmosphere. 

Vivian 
And every winter cheerful folk, 

Six millions powerless to escape, 
Upon this clammy muslin choke 

This filthy air of sodden crape. 

Bertram 
Expecting no imperial cure 

From any corporate King Log 
6i 



6z ECLOGUES 

They undergo it, forte et dure. 

The torture of the London fog. 

And though habitual croakers croak, 

A metaphysical desire 
Not to consume our proper smoke, 

Save when the chimney goes on fire. 

Through urban and suburban deeps 
Sub-conscious in the minds of all, 

Explains the tolerance that keeps 
Our fog 9. hardy annual. 

Lionel 
I love the fog: in every street 

Shrill muffled cries and shapes forlorn, 
The frosted hoof with stealthy beat. 

The hollow sounding motor-horn: 

A fog that lasts till, gently wrung 
By Pythian pangs, we realise 

That Doomsday somewhere dawns among 
The systems and the galaxies. 

And ruin at the swiftest rate 

The chartered destinies pursue; 

While as for us, our final fate 

Already fixed with small ado. 



ECLOGUES 63 

Spills on our heads no wrathful cup, 
Now wrecks us on a fiery shore, 

But leaves us simply swallowed up 
In London fog for evermore. 

Cyril 
The admirable errantry 

Of London's climate who can sing? 
From fogs of filthy muslin free, 
^ Elastic as a morn of Spring. 

The weather, like a dazzling bride, 
Undid the lonely winter, threw 

The casemate of the arient wide 

And made the enchanted world anew. 

But yesterday, so quick and so 

Chromatic Is the climate here — 

From russet mud to silver snow, 

From radiant suns to fogs austere. 

Lionel 
I watched the morning yesterday 

Where from the ample stair you look 
Across the Park beneath the grey 

Ungainly column of the Duke; 

You see him like a stylite true 

Impaled upon his pillar stand: — 



<4 ECLOGUES 

It seems to pierce him through and through, 
The rod that braves the brand. 



Sunlit the other column glowed 

Intensely, lifting to the skies 
The admiral who swept the road 

Of empire clear for centuries. 

Entangled on the Surrey-side 

The eager day a moment hung, 

Then struck in hate his ardent stride 

And round the southern chimneys swung. 

A silvery weft of finest lawn, 

So thin, so phantom-like, became 

Ethereal mystery scarcely drawn 

Athwart the morning's saffron flame. 

The Palace and the Abbey lost 

Their character of masonry, 
Transformed to glittering shadows tossed 

And buoyant on a magic sea. 

And park and lake and precincts old 
Of Westminster were all arrayed 

In spectral weeds of pearl and gold 
And airy drifts of amber braid. 



ECLOGUES 6s 

Bertram 
Ghastly and foul, as Hecate's ban 

Pernicious are our fogs; but sweet 
And wonderful the mists that can 

Imparadise a London street. 

The fabrics winnowed sunbeams work 

Or urban dew and smoky air; 
The opalescences that lurk 

In many a court and sombre square. 

The tissued dawn that gems encrust, 

The violet wreaths of noon, the haze 

Of emerald and topaz dust 

That shrouds the evening distances; 

And gloom in baths of light annealed. . . . 

ENTER SANDY 

Lionel 
From top to toe one travel-stain 
You came? And whence? 

Sandy 
An outland weald 
I come from, and a dateless reign 
That modes and periods never touch. 

Bertram 
From Epping Forest, I'll be sworn, 
The wilderness you haunt so much! 



66 ECLOGUES 

Sandy 

No; from a less familiar bourne: 
A Sussex chace renowned of old 

Where withering innovation halts; 
A tract of mingled wood and wold, 

Of ragged heaths and ferny vaults. 

Lionel 
St. Leonard's Forest by your shoes 

Over the latchet daubed with earth! 
I know it well: the Mole, the Ouse, 

Arun and Adur have their birth. 

Among its silting springs; and there 
The nightingale has never sung 

They say, so humid is the air, 

So dank the woods with ivy hung. 

In summer-time you lightly tread 
On moss as green as emerald. 

And soft as silken velvet spread 

Along the forest chancel, stalled 

With bowers of thorn and laurel-tree; 

And roomier and loftier 
Than forest aisles are wont to be, 

The green groined roof of beach and fir, 



ECLOGUES 67 

Admits a dulcet twilight filled 

With golden notes and beryl hues, 

That through the darkling thickets gild 
Arun and Adur, Mole and Ouse. 

Sandy 
When I went out from Horsham town 

A Northern blast of winter's breath 
Blew low across the open down 

As hard as hate, as cold as death. 

Close to the land the firmament 

Like a camp-celling clung; and nigh 

The eaves of the horizon, bent 

Like frowning brows, the ashen sky 

Through ruined loop-holes scattered wide 
A pallid gleam; but as the path, 

Leaving the highway leapt aside 

To gain the forest, winter's wrath, 

By sheltering hedgerows doubly baulked, 

Became a legendary thing, 
And for awhile beside me walked 

The very presence of the spring. 

A bridge that spans a pebbled burn 
The threshold of the forest is; 

And there like some daedallan urn, 
Or sangreal of fragrances. 



6% ECLOGUES 

A deeply sunk, a vaulted dell 

Possessed the summer's inmost soul — 
A captive, like the roscal smell 

That haunts a seeming-empty bowl. 

Though all the roses, plucked and rent, 
Are squandered yet our essence knows 

And greets the pure material scent. 
Which is the spirit of the rose. 

Within the forest-chancel, stalled 

With bowers of evergreen and laid 

With lustrous living emerald, 

As rich a moss as spring displayed. 

No green groined roof of fir and beach 
Reflected bronze and beryl hues, 

That could through darkling thickets reach 
Arun and Adur, Mole and Ouse. 

Unthatched, instead of summer's leaves, 
A roof, with ebon rafters bare. 

Allowed the light in frosted sheaves 
To silver all the wintry air. 

With clapping wings doves wheeled about 
Between the pine-tops and the skies; 

And blackbirds flitted in and out 

The underwood with guttural cries. 



ECLOGUES 69 

A throstle had begun to build 

Though still untimed ; but loud and long 
The eager storm-cock sang and filled 

The forest with his splendid song; 

While spring, in winter's bosom warm, 
Prologued in bough and bob and root 

The pregnant trance of trees that form 

The summer's foliage, flower and fruit. 

Bertram 
Harvest in Winter's bosom sleeps, 
While time his patient vigil keeps. 



II 

ST. valentine's day 
Ernest. Julian. 

Julian 

Virginia lives in a square ; 

I harbour at hand in a street: 
And Spring has begun over there; 

So love like a pestilence sweet 
Envenoms the neighbouring air. 

Ernest 

No pestilence, Julian! Greet 
The coming of Spring with delight. 

Have done with your modish display! 
The cynic's intelligent spite 

Arrives by the miriest way: 
The ferment that works in the night 

Of a prodigal, desolate day, 
A morbid, acidulent scorn, 

Inhabits the vinegared lees 
In bosoms condignly forlorn — 
70 



ECLOGUES 7« 

Julian 

In bosoms philosophy frees 
From the burden to which we are born! 

Ernest 

In bosoms that nothing can please, 
Being empty of pleasure and sunk 

In themselves; being wizened and frail 
Like vats when the wine has been drunk — 

Being warped and unspeakably stale 
Like vats in desuetude shrunk. 

Let the season and nature prevail ; 
Let the winepress of youth over- run; — 

Julian 

If the valves be corroded with rust, 
And the power and gearing undone! 

Ernest 

Empurpled with stains of the worst 
My fancy, forestalling the sun — 

Julian 
In the city we take him on trust! 



73 ECLOGUES 

Ernest 

Disheartened the fog with a glance, 
And tinctured with opulent dyes 

Of the lily, the rose and the paunce 

The sombre, the tenebrous skies — 

With the tricoloured blazon of France, 
And the light of a paramour's eyes! 

For this is St. Valentine's day, 

And my sweetheart came into the lane; 
As I went by the speediest way, 

Being late for the morning train, 
Diana, in sweet disarray, 

The wonder of women, was fain 
To see and be seen of me first! 

Julian 

How happy to love and be loved ! 
How wretched is he, how accursed. 
Whom Destiny handles ungloved! 

Ernest 

The highest encounter the worst; 

For they must be sifted and proved, 
While the rabble are shaken with ease 

Through a wide-meshed riddle of Fate. 



ECLOGUES 73 

Julian 
O spare your proverbial pleas 

And the wisdom that wiseacres prate! 

Ernest 
You said that philosophy frees — 

Julian 

From a passion I would not abate 
For the wealth of the world all told? 

From the exquisite alchemy pain, 
That tortures the dross into gold? 

I spoke in a negligent vein, 
For I love like the lovers of old. 

Adoring a woman's disdain. 
That crushed the doughtiest hope. 

Ernest 
You speak like a vassal of words 

The indolent slave of a trope! 
Exalt your irresolute thirds 

Into fifths and their jubilant scope; 
And learn of St. Valentine's birds 

That love is the herald of joy. 

Julian 
The pursuivant rather of care! 



74 ECLOGUES 

Ernest 
You must brood on her beauty and cloy 

Your fancy, extinguish despair 
With obdurate visions; destroy 

Yourself in her excellence rare; 
Be burled in dreams of her worth! 

Julian 

My heart with her excellence bleeds; 
My dreams of her people the earth. 

And the curse Is, there's nothing she needs; 
She Is rich and a woman of birth. 

While I am the son of my deeds. 

Ernest 
Achieve then a sire of renown; 

Perform to the height and be great. 
You have fought 

Julian 

And defeat was my crown! 

When, naked, I wrestled with Fate, 
The Destinies trampled me down: — 

I fought In the van and was great, 
And I won, though I wore no crown. 

In the lists of the world; for Fate 
And the Destinies trampled me down — 
The myrmidons trampled me down. 



SNOW 

I 

" Who affirms that crystals are alive? " 
I affirm it, let who will deny: — 

Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive, 

Wane and wither; I have seen them die. 

Trust me, masters, crystals have their day, 
Eager to attain the perfect norm. 

Lit with purpose, potent to display 

Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form. 

n 

Water-crystals need for flower and root 
Sixty clear degrees, no less, no more; 

Snow, so fickle, still in this acute 

Angle thinks, and learns no other lore. 

Such its life, and such its pleasure is, 

Such its art and traffic, such its gain. 

Evermore in new conjunctions this 
Admirable angle to maintain. 

75 



76 SNOW 

Crystal craft in every flower and flake 
Snow exhibits, of the welkin free: 

Crystalline are crystals for the sake, 
All and singular, of crystalry. 

Yet does every crystal of the snow 

Individualise, a seedling sown 
Broadcast, but instinct with power to grow 

Beautiful in beauty of its own. 

Every flake with all its prongs and dints 
Burns ecstatic as a new-lit star: 

Men are not more diverse, finger-prints 
More dissimilar than snow-flakes are. 

Worlds of men and snow endure, increase. 
Woven of power and passion to defy 

Time and travail: only races cease, 
Individual men and crystals die. 

Ill 

Jewelled shapes of snow whose feathery showers, 
Fallen or falling wither at a breath, 

All afraid are they, and loth as flowers, 

Beasts and men to tread the way to death. 

Once I saw upon an object-glass, 

Martyred underneath a microscope, 

One elaborate snow-flake slowly pass, 

Dying hard, beyond the reach of hope. 



SNOW 77 

Still from shape to shape the crystal changed, 

Writhing in its agony; and still, 
Less and less elaborate, arranged 

Potently the angle of its will. 

Tortured to a simple final form, 

Angles six and six divergent beams, 

Lo, in death it touched the perfect norm, 
Verifying all its crystal dreams! 

IV 

Such the noble tragedy of one 

Martyred snow-flake. Who can tell the fate 
Heinous and uncouth of showers undone. 

Fallen in cities! — Showers that expiate 

Errant lives from polar worlds adrift 

When the great millennial snows abide; 

Castaways from mountain-chains that lift 
Snowy summits in perennial pride; 

Nomad snows, or snows in evil day 
Born to urban ruin, to be tossed. 

Trampled, shovelled, ploughed and swept away 
Down the setting sewers: all the frost 

Flowers of heaven melted up with lees, 

Offal, recrement, but every flake 
Showing to the last in fixed degrees 

Perfect crystals for the crystal's sake. 



78 SNOW 

V 

Usefulness of snow is but a chance 

Here in temperate climes with winter sent, 

Sheltering earth's prolonged hibernal trance: 
All utility is accident. 

Sixty clear degrees the joyful snow, 

Practising economy of means, 
Fashions endless beauty in, and so 

Glorifies the universe with scenes, 

Arctic and antarctic: stainless shrouds, 
Ermine woven in silvery frost, attire 

Peaks in every land among the clouds 

Crowned with snows to catch the morning's 
fire. 



THE TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMON SIM- 
PLEX CONCERNING AUTOMO- 
BILISM 

That railways are inadequate appears 

Indubitable now. For sixty years 

Their comfort grew until the train de luxe 

Arrived, arousing in conducted books, 

And other wholesale, tourists, an envious smart. 

For here they recognised the perfect art 

And science of land-travel. Now we sing 

A greater era, hail a happier Spring. 

The motor-car reveals ineptitude 

For railway-trains; and travellers conclude 

The railway is archaic: strictly true, 

Although the reason sounds as false as new: — 

Railways are democratic, vulgar, laic; 

And who can doubt Democracy's archaic? 

The railway was the herald and the sign, 
And powerful agent in the swift decline 
Of Europe and the West. The future sage 
Will blame sententiously the railway age, 
Preachers upon its obvious vices pounce, 
And poets, wits and journalists pronounce 

79 



8o tiestAment of sir simplex 

The nineteenth century in prose and rhyme 

The most unhappy period of time. 

That nations towering once in pomp and pride 

Of monarchs, rank and breeding, should subside 

To one dead undistinguishable horde 

Sans sceptre, mitre, coronet and sword, 

Reverting to a pithecoidal state 

May be the purpose of recurrent fate; 

But that such folks should to themselves appear 

Progressing toward a great millennial year 

Is just the bitter-sweet, the chilly-hot, 

The subtle metaphysic of the plot. 

The last age saw the last stage of the fit 

That pestered, when the Roman Empire split, 

The catalytic centuries: the strange 

Insanity that fed on secular change; 

The general paralysis of men 

That ended in the railway and then 

Called London: from the Tiber to the Thames, 

From dreaming empire to delirious aims 

That move the laughter of the careless fates 

And effervesce in socialistic pates. 

But convalescence with the car begins 
And petrol expiates our railway sins. 
Before w^e know we shall with joy behold 
A world as sane as any world of old; 



TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 8i 

From labour and electoral problems free, 
A world the fibre of whose health shall be, 
No Will to be the Mob, but mastering all, 
A Will to be the Individual; 
For every Mob exhales a poisonous breath. 
And Socialism is decadence, is death: 
The Mob expropriates, degrades, destroys; 
The Individual conquers, makes, enjoys. 
Not till the motor was the contrast plain, 
Because the separate classes of the train 
Deceived us with a choice of company; 
And, when he liked, the tame celebrity. 
The genius, man of wealth, aristocrat, 
By means of tips through any journey sat 
In correct state; or, with sufficient pelf, 
Could purchase a compartment for himself. 
He rather would have deemed himself a snob 
Than that the train could turn him into Meb, 
Till automotion's privacy and pride 
Exposed the grossness of the railway ride; 
For 'twas the freedom of the motor-car 
That showed how tyrannous the railways are. 

To go by train from one place to another 

You have to brave the station's smoke and smother: 

The train derides you there; 'twill never come 

To pick you up, nor turn, to see you home, 

A single wheel : the getting under way, 



Sa TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 

The true vexation of a holiday, 

The stolid train permits you to deplore; 

But with your automobile at the door — 

Why, there you are, nor need you stir a foot, 

Man and portmanteau instantly en route! 

You buy a ticket if you go by train 

At some ofifensive loophole, which you gain 

After prolonged attendance in a queue — 

Whatever class you take, a motley crew: 

And to await one's turn, like patient Job, 

Unites one with a vengeance to the Mob. 

Then you may miss the train; but you must wait 

Its advent and departure prompt or late. 

The motor soothes, the railway racks your nerves; 

The train commands, the automobile serves. 

The automobile nurses all caprice, 

And gives the longest life a second lease; 

Indulgences, indolence, and even in me 

Increases individuality. 

I thought, and many my opinion shared. 
That the deceased politic who declared 
That all were Socialists, had told, perhaps, 
A fib exploited in a studied lapse 
Of platform declamation as a sop 
To catch erratic voters on the hop, 
The strained politeness of a caustic mind, 
A dead-lift ciiort to say something kind. 



TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 83 

'Twas more than that: not only had we learned 
To suffer Socialism; our soul's discerned 
A something fine about it; egoists even 
Perceived therein at last a mundane heaven. 

" Life is a railway journey," genius thought — 

(The erring genius very cheaply bought 

With gilded apples of Asphaltites) — 

" Thieves bearing swag, and poets sprouting bags, 

The ring, the cabinet, scortatory dames. 

Bishops, sectarians of a myriad names, 

Bankers and brokers, merchants, mendicants, 

Booked in the same train like a swarm of ants; 

First, second, third class, mass and mob expressed, 

Together to the Islands of the Blest — 

Each passenger provided with a groat 

To pass the Stygian stile for Charon's boat. 

Or broad or narrow as the gauge may run. 

None leaves the track without disaster; none 

Escapes a single stoppage on the way; 

And none arrives before his neighbour may. 

In the guard's van my sacred luggage knocks 

Against the tourist's traps, the bagman's box; 

And people with inferior aims to mine 

Partake the rapid transit of the line. 

But this is culture of the social school, 

And teaches me to lead my life by rule 

Empirical, of positive descent 



S4 TESTAMIEISIT OF SIR SIMPLEX 

And altruistic self-embezzlement. 

Life is a railway journey: I rejoice 

That folk whose purpose, visage, clothes and voice 

Offend we will continue to offend 

In the same train until the journey's end." 

So spoke the genius in pathetic rage.- ••" 

The socialistic and the railway age 

Were certainly coeval; machinery too 

Equated commission; and every new 

Development of electricity 

Was welcomed by the Mob with three times three, 

Convinced the world at last was through the wood — 

Right through to Universal Brotherhood! 

Conceive it: — Universal Brotherhood, 

With everybody feeble, kind and good! 

I, even I, Sir Simon Simplex, know 

The world would end to-day if that were so. 

What spur does man require, what stinging zest 

To do still better than his level best? 

Why, enemies; and if he has them not 

He must unearth and beat them till they're hot; 

For only enmity can train and trounce 

The cortex and the muscle to an ounce. 

Let Socialists deny, mistaking peace, 

That only with the world will warfare cease; 

When we behold the battle-flags unfurled 

We know the fates phlebotomise the world, 



TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 85 

And alternate with peace's patent pill, 
The old heroic cure for every ill. 

Life was a railway journey; foe and friend, 
Infected with nostalgia of the end, 
Awaited patiently the crack of doom; 
Predestined to postpone the judgment-day, 
Arrived in time to show a better way. 
And when the Automobile came, we found 
Our incorrupt opinion safe and sound. 
Inoculated only by the schism, 
For every proof against all Socialism. 

The motor stops the decadence: not all 

Are in the same train with the prodigal. 

The Christian scientist, the souteneur. 

The Gothamite, the man from anywhere. 

Domestic Gill and idiomatic Jack, 

The wheedling knave, the sneak, the hectoring 

quack ; 
The man of broader mind and farther goal 
Is not entrained with Lubin Littlesoul; 
Your gentleman by birth and quickened sense. 
Refined requirements and abundant pence, 
And men of faculty and swelling aim 
Who conquer riches, power, position, fame. 
Are not entrained with loafers, quibblers, cranks, 
Nor with the Mob who never leave the ranks. 



86 TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 

With plodding dullness, unambitious ease, 
And discontented incapacities. 

Goodwill is in the blood, in you and me, 

And most in men of wealth and pedigree; 

So rich and poor, men, women, age and youth 

Imagined some ingredient of truth 

In Socialistic faith that there could be 

A common basis of equality. 

But now we know and by the motor swear 

The prepossession was as false as fair; 

Men are not equal; no two intellects 

Are of a calibre; desires, defects, 

Powers, aptitudes, are never on a par. 

No more than fingerprints and noses are. 

And on my soul and conscience, I maintain 

Political equality as vain 

As personal: for instance, I would place 

The franchise on a principle of race. 

And give the Saxon's forward reach a felt 

Prepotence o'er the backward-glancing belt; 

And if his chauffeur counts as one, why then 

Sir Simon Simplex should be reckoned ten. 

I call Democracy archaic, just 

As manhood suffrage is atavic lust 

For folkmotes of the prime, whose analogue 

In travel was the train, a passing vogue: 



TESTAMENT OF SIR SIMPLEX 87 

The automobile put an end to that, 

And left Democracy as fallen and flat 

As railway-stock. Wealth and the crafty hand 

That gathers wealth had always at command 

Horse-carriages for private travel, but 

The pace had got beyond that leisured rut; 

Class, mass and mob for fifty years and more 

Had all to travel in the jangling roar 

Of railways, the nomadic caravan 

That stifled individual mind in man, 

Till automobilism arose at last! 

Nor with the splendid periods of the past 

Our youthful century is proudly linked ; 

And things that Socialism supposed extinct, 

Degree, nobility and noble strife, 

A form, a style, a privacy in life 

Will reappear; and, crowning Nature's plan, 

The individual and the gentleman 

In England reassume his lawful place 

And vindicate the greatness of the race. 



THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 

Quenched is the fire on autumn's hearth, 
The ingle vacant, hushed the song; 

But the resolved, consistent earth, 
And Nature, tolerant and strong. 

Serenely wait the ordered change 

Of times and tides. Ten thousand years 
Of day and night, the scope and range 

Of liberal seasons; smiles and tears. 

Of June and April; brumal storm 

Autumnal calm, and flower and fruit: 

These are the rich content, the form 
Of Nature's mind; these constitute 

The academe and discipline, 

The joust and knightly exercise, 

The culture of the earth wherein 
The earth's profound composure lies. 

The wisdom of the earth excels 
The craft and skill of every age. 

Witness the tale the Persian tells 
Of Mithridates, King and mage. 

88 



THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 89 

The whole divan extolled his powers: 

They said the soil revered him so, 
That, if he planted sawdust, flowers 

Of every hue would promptly grow. 

" So be it! " quoth the King of Kings: 
" Bring hither sweepings of the street, 

Chaff, sawdust, money, jewels, rings. 
And fifty grains of summer wheat." 

He sowed them in a fertile bed. 

And set a guard about the plot 
Both day and night: "Although," he said, 

" The earth is honest, men are not." 

The wheat betimes began to grow. 

In shame as in a mordant steeped, 
The viziers, sulking in a row, 

Beheld at length the harvest reaped. 

Said then the King, "A sheaf! Proceed: 
Thresh, winnow, grind it, bolt and bake, 

And bring with all convenient speed 
Of leavened bread a goodly cake. 

" For you, my worthy viziers — come ! 

The marvellous crops you promised me ? " 
The whole perturbed divan, as dumb 

As oysters, felt indeed at sea. 



90 THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 

" Ha! " cried the King, "when shall we laugh 
At prodigies great nature grants 

Almighty monarchs? Fruit of chaff, 

Where is it? Where, my sawdust-plants? 

" The vine and vintage of my gold ? 

My silver-bushes, where are they? 
My coin should yield a hundred-fold 

By nature's lavish usury! 

" My fragrant banks of posied rings 
Where diamonds blossom, show us; show 

In arbours where the bulbul sings 
A branch of budding rubies glow. 

" My jewel-orchards, money-shrubs? 

Perhaps they're sprouting underground? 
My cash, at least, among the grubs — 

My cash and gems! Let them be found! 

"Dig, viziers, dig!" The viziers dug: 
Among the deep roots of the grain. 

With here an earthworm, there a slug 
They found the treasure, sowed in vain. 

And all the sweepings of the streets, 
The chaff, the rubbish? Like a jest 

Forgiven, forgotten! So discreet 
Is nature's kindly alkahest. 



THE CAKE OF MITHRIDATES 91 

Then every vizier lost his nerve, 
Expecting death, a prompt despatch. 

But Mithridates said, " Observe 

How great the soil is: bulbuls hatch 

" The cuckoo's eggs, w^hereas the earth 
Ignores the costliest stone to feed 

With chosen fare and bring to birth 
The soul of any honest seed. 

" The earth is true and harbours not 
Imposture: all your flattering lies 

Are buried in this garden-plot; 
Be genuine if you would be wise." 

With that the baker, breathing spice, 
Produced the cake hot from the fire, 

And every vizier ate a slice 
Resolving to be less a liar. 



THE LUTANIST 

The harvests of purple and gold 

Are garnered and trodden ; dead leaves 
To-morrow will carpet the wold ; 

And the arbours and sylvan eaves 
Dismantled, no welcome extend; 

The bowers and sheltering eaves 
Will witness to-morrow the end 

Of their stained, of their sumptuous leaves. 
While tempests apparel the wold 
In their cast-off crimson and gold. 

But I of abundance to be 

Think only, the corn and the wine, 
The manifold wealth of the sea 

And the harvest-home of the mine. 
Decay and the fall of leave, 

Lost lives in the tenebrous mine, 
Disaster, disconsolate grief 

Molest not the corn and the wine, 
The infinite wealth of the sea 
And the bountiful harvests to be. 

For beneath are the heavens and above,^ 
And time is a silken yoke; 

92 



THE LUTANIST 93 

My lute is my friend ; and I love 
A beautiful maid of my folk — • 

A marvel to see and adore, 

Astounding her foes and her folk 

With silence and exquisite lore 
Of youth and its delicate yoke, 

With wonderful wisdom in love. 

And the music beneath and above. 

I think how her beauty would kill 

A lover less ardent than I, 
I faint and my heart stands still 

In the street when she passes by; 
My lute, I bid it be dumb: — 

" Hush, for my love goes by ! 
O hush, or she may not come! 

A lover less ardent than I 
Her beauty might palsy, might kill ! 
Lute-strings, heart-strings, be still ! 

But when she has passed, a spell 

Delivers my voice and my lute; 
My songs and my melodies well 

Like fountains; like clusters of fruit 
My fantasy ripens; my rhymes, 

With savour of wayside fruit 
And sweet as aerial chimes 

Of flower-bells, ring to my lute; 



94 THE LUTANIST 

Like fountains my melodies well 

When the thought of her works like a spell. 

She walks and the emerald lawn 

Is jewelled at every tread ; 
Like the burning tresses of dawn 

The virgin gold of her head 
Illumines the land and the sea; 

From her glittering feet to her head 
Is the essence of being — is she 

Who walks with a magical tread 
As she dazzles the eyes of dawn 
And jewels the grass-green lawn. 

Though the harvests of purple and gold 

Are garnered, and fallen leaves 
To-morrow will carpet the wold, 

I think how the sylvan eaves 
A welcome in summer extend, 

How the bowers and the sheltering eaves 
Will mantle in summer and bend 

With their bloom and their burden of leaves, 
And autumn apparel the wold 
In harvests of purple and gold. 



ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT 

St. Michael's Mount, the tidal isle, 

In May with daffodils and lilies 
Is kirtled gorgeously a while 

As ne'er another English hill is: 
About the precipices cling 
The rich renascence robes of Spring. 

Her gold and silver, nature's gifts. 

The prodigal with both hands showers: 
O rich in patches, not in drifts 

But round and round a mount of flowers 
Of lilies and of daffodils. 
The envy of all other hills. 

And on the lofty summit looms 

The castle: None could build or plan It. 
The four square foliage springs and blooms, 
The piled elaborate flower of granite, 
That not the sun can wither; no, 
Nor any tempest overthrow. 



95 



TWO DOGS 

Two dogs on Bournemouth beach: a mongrel, one, 
With spaniel plainest on the palimpsest. 
The blur of muddled stock; the other, bred, 
With tapering muzzle, rising brow, strong jaw — 
A terrier to the tail's expressive tip. 
Magnetic, nimble, endlessly alert. 

The mongrel, wet and shivering, at my feet 
Deposited a weage of half-inch board, 
A foot in length and splintered at the butt ; 
Withdrew a yard and crouched in act to spring, 
While to and fro between his wedge and me 
The glancing shuttle of his eager look 
A purpose wore. The terrier; ears a-cock. 
And neck one curve of sheer intelligence, 
Stood sentinel: no sound, no movement, save 
The mongrel's telegraphic eyes, bespoke 
The object of the canine pantomime. 

I stooped to grasp the wedge, knowing the game; 
But like a thing uncoiled the mongrel snapped 
It oil, and promptly set It out again. 
The terrier at his quarters, every nerve 
Waltzing inside his lithe rigidity. 

96 



TWO DOGS 97 

" More complex than I thought ! " Again I made 
To seize the wedge; again the mongrel won, 
Whipped off the Jack, relaid it, crouched and 

watched, 
The terrier at attention all the time. 
I won the third bout: ere the mongrel snapped 
His toy, I stayed my hand: he halted, half 
Across the neutral ground, and in the pause 
Of doubt I seized the prize. A vanquished yelp 
From both; and then intensest vigilance. 

Together, when I tossed the wedge, they plunged 
Before it reached the sea. The mongrel, out 
Among the waves, and standing to them, meant 
Heroic business; but the terrier dodged 
Behind, adroitly scouting in the surf. 
And seized the wedge, rebutted by the tide. 
In shallow water, while the mongrel searched 
The English Channel on his hind-legs poised 
The terrier laid the trophy at my feet: 
And neither dog protested when I took 
The wedge: the overture of their marine 
Diversion had been played out once for all. 

A second match the reckless mongrel won, 
Vanishing twice under the heavy surf. 
Before he found and brought the prize to land. 
Then for an hour the aquatic sport went on, 



9^ TWO DOGS 

And still the mongrel took the heroic role, 
The terrier hanging deftly in the rear. 
Sometimes the terrier when the mongrel found 
Betrayed a jealous scorn, as who should say, 
" Your hero's always a vulgarian ! Pah ! " 
But when the mongrel missed, after a fight 
With such a sea of troubles, and saw the prize 
Grabbed by the terrier In an Inch of surf. 
He seemed entirely satisfied, and watched 
With more pathetic vigilance the cast 
That followed. 

" Once a passion, mongrel, this 
Retrieving of a stick," I told the brute, 
" Has now become a vice with you. Go home ! 
Wet to the marrow and palsied with the cold, 
You won't give in, and, good or bad, you've earned 
My admiration. Go home now and get warm. 
And the best bone in the pantry." As I talked 
I stripped the water from his hybrid coat. 
Laughed and made much of him — which mortified 
The funking terrier. 

"I'm despised, it seems!'* 
The terrier thought. " My cleverness (my feet 
are barely wet!) beside the mongrel's zeal 
Appears timidity. This biped's mad 



TWO DOGS 99 

To pet the stupid brute. Yap ! Yah ! " He 

seized 
The wedge and went; and at his heels at once, 
Without a thought of me, the mongrel trudged. 

Along the beach, smokers of cigarettes, 
All sixpenny-novel-readers to a man. 
Attracted Master Terrier. Again the wedge, 
Passed to the loyal mongrel, was teed with care; 
Again the fateful overture began. 
Upon the fourth attempt, and not before. 
And by a feint at that, the challenged youth 
(Most equable, be sure, of all the group: 
Allow the veriest dog to measure men!) 
Secured the soaked and splintered scrap of deal. 

Thereafter, as with me, the game progressed, 
The breathless, shivering, mongrel, rushing out 
Into the heavy surf, there to be tossed 
And tumbled like a floating bunch of kelp, 
While gingerly the terrier picked his steps 
Strategic in the rear, and snapped the prize 
Oftener than his more adventurous, more 
Romantic, more devoted rival did. 
The uncomfortable moral glares at one! 
And, further, in the mongrel's wistful mind 
A primitive idea darkly wrought: 



loo TWO DOGS 

Having once lost the prize in the overture 

With his bipedal rival, he felt himself 

In honour and in conscience bound to plunge 

For ever after it at the winner's will. 

But the smart terrier was an Overdog, 

And knew a trick worth two of that. He 

thought — 
If canine cerebration works like ours, 
And I interpret the canine mind aright — 
" Let men and mongrels worry and wet their coats! 
I use my brains and choose the better part. 
Quick-witted ease and self-approval lift 
Me miles above this anxious cur, absorbed, 
Body and soul, in playing a game I win 
Without an effort. And yet the mongrel seems 
The happier dog. How's that? Belike, the old 
Compensator}^ principle again. 
I have pre-eminence and conscious worth; 
And he has power to fling himself away 
For anything or nothing. Men and dogs, 
What an unfathomable world it is! " 



THE WASP 

Once as I went by rail to Epping Street, 
Both windows being open, a wasp flew in; 
Through the compartment swung and almost out, 
Scarce seen, scarce heard; but dead against the 

pane 
Entitled " Smoking," did the train's career 
Arrest her passage. Such a wonderful 
Impervious transparency, before 
That palpitating moment, had never yet 
Her airy voyage thwarted. Undismayed, 
With diligence incomparable, she sought 
An exit, till the letters like a snare 
Entangled her; or else the frosted glass 
And signature indelible appeared 
The key to all the mystery: there she groped. 
And flirted petulant wings, and fiercely sang 
A counter-spell against the sorcery, 
The sheer enchantment that inhibited 
Her access to the world — her birthright there! 
So visible, and so beyond her reach ! 
Baffled and raging like a tragic queen, 
She left at last the stencilled tablet; roamed 
The pane a while to cool her regal ire. 
Then tentatively touched the window-frame: 

lOI 



102 THE WASP 

Sure footing still, though rougher than the glass; 
Dissimilar in texture, and so obscure! 

Perplexed now by opacity, with foot and wing 
She coasted up and down the wood and worked 
Her wrath to passion-point again. Then from the 

frame 
She slipped by chance into the open space 
Left by the lowered sash: — the world once more 
In sight! She paused; she closed her wings, and 

felt 
The air with learned antennae for the smooth 
Resistance that she knew now must belong 
To such mysterious transparences. 
No foothold? Down she fell — six inches down! — 
Hovered a second, dazed and delirious still; 
Then soared away, a captive queen set free. 



THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 

As grey and dank as dust and ashes slaked 

With wash of urban tides the morning lowered; 

But over Chelsea Bridge the sagging sky 

Had colour in it — blots of faintest bronze, 

The stains of daybreak. Westward slabs of light 

From vapour disentangled, sparsely glazed 

The panelled firmament; but vapour held 

The morning captive in the smoky east. 

At lowest ebb the tide on either bank 

Laid bare the fat mud of the Thames, all pinched 

And scalloped thick with dwarfish surges. Cranes, 

Derricks and chimney-stalks of the Surrey-side, 

Inverted shadows, in the motionless. 

Dull, leaden mirror of the channel hung: 

Black flags of smoke broke out, and in the dead 

Sheen of the water hovered underneath, 

As in the upper region, listlessly, 

Across the viaduct, trailing plumes of steam. 

The trains clanked in and out. 

Slowly the sun 
Undid the homespun swathing of the clouds, 
And splashed his image on the northern shore — 
A thing extravagantly beautiful: 

103 



IO+ THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 

The glistening, close-grained canvas of the mud 
Like hammered copper shone, and all about 
The burning centre of the mirror'd orb's 
Illimitable depth of silver fire 
Harmonious beams, the overtones of light, 
Suffused the emboss'd, metallic river bank. 
Woven of rainbows a dewdrop can dissolve 
And packed with power a simple lens can wield, 
The perfect, only source of beauty, light 
Reforms uncouthest shapelessness and turns 
Decoloured refuse Into ornament; 
The leafless trees that lined the vacant street 
Had all their stems picked out in golden scales, 
Their branches carved in ebony; and shed 
Around them by the sanction of the acorn 
In lieu of leaves each wore an aureole. 

Barges at anchor, barges stranded, hulks 
Ungainly, in the unshorn beams and rich 
Replenished planet of a winter sun, 
Appeared ethereal, and about to glide 
On high adventure chartered, swift away 
For regions undiscovered. 

Huddled wharfs 
A while, and then once more a reach of Thames 
Visibly flowing where the sun and wind 
Together caught the current. Quays and piers 



THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 105 

To Vauxhall Bridge, and there the Baltic Wharf 

Exhibited its wonders: figureheads 

Of the old wooden walls on gate and post — 

Colossal torsos, bulky bosoms thrown 

Against the storm, sublime uplifted eyes 

Telling the stars. As white as ghosts 

They overhung the way, usurping time 

With carved memorials of the past. Forlorn 

Elysium of the weight of England! 

Gulls 
Riparian scavengers, arose and wheeled 
About my head, for morsels begging loud 
With savage cries that piercingly reverbed 
The tempest's dissonance. Birds in themselves 
Unmusical and uninventive ape 
Impressive things with mocking undesigned: 
The eagle's bark mimics the crashing noise 
That shakes his eyry when the thunder roars; 
And chanticleer's imperious trumpet-call 
Re-echoes round the world his ancestor's 
Barbaric high-wrought challenge to the dawn; 
But birds of homely feather and tuneful throat, 
With music in themselves and masterdom. 
To beauty turn obsessive sight and sounds: 
The mounting larks, compact of joyful fire, 
Render the coloured sunlight into song; 
Adventurous and impassioned nightingales 



io6 THE THAMES EMBANKMENT 

Transmute the stormy equinox they breast 

With courage high, for hawthorn thickets bound 

When spring arrives, into the melody 

That floods the forest aisles; the robin draws 

Miraculously from the rippling brook 

The red wine of his lay; blackbird and thrush, 

Prime-artists of the woodland, proudly take 

All things sonorous for their province, weave 

The gold-veined thunder and the crystal showers, 

The winds, the rivers and the choir of birds 

In the rich strains of their chromatic score. 

By magic mechanism the w^eltering clouds 

Re-grouped themselves in continents and isles 

That diapered the azure firmament; 

And sombre chains of cumulus, outlined 

In ruddy shade along the house-tops loomed. 

Phantasmal Alp on Alp. The sunbeams span 

Chaotic vapour into cosmic forms. 

And juggled in the sky, with hoods of cloud 

As jesters twirl on sticks their booby-caps — 

The potent sunbeams, that had fished the whole 

Enormous mass of moisture from the sea. 

Kneaded, divided and divided, wrought 

And turned it to a thousand fantasies 

Upon the ancient potter's wheel, the earth. 



THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD 

More than one way of walking? Verily; 
But, for the art of walking, only one. 
Beginners in the ambulative art, 
As in all art, are immethodical : 
Your want of method, rightly understood. 
Is faculty, and not its absence; style 
Adventurous of genius; say, a gift; 
Immethod, necessary handicap 
Upon originality, that loses 
Matches many on time or w^eight, but beats 
The winner virtually. The crammer's wiles, 
And royal roads to knowledge, short-cuts, keys. 
And time-and-labour-saving mechanism 
Beset the ambulative acolyte; 
But true originality in art 
Would not at first, even if it could, possess 
Impeccable technique; and your foredoomed 
Pedestrian errs designedly (if one 
Whose privilege it is to deviate 
Can ever be arraigned for trespass) bent 
On quitting, jeopardy or none, the old 
Immediately seductive methods blazed 
By trained precursors in pedestrial art. 

107 



io8 THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD 

At first then the prospective walker, rash 
As any hero, dedicates himself 
To chance. A vagabond upon the earth. 
He leads a life uncertain: art and craft 
Pedalian suffer secret chrysalid 
Probations and adventures ere they gain 
The ultimate image of complete 
Pedestrianism. Through gross suburban miles 
And over leagues of undistinguished ground 
He plods, he tramps. Utilitarian thoughts 
Of exercise and health extenuate 
The dullness of the duty; he persuades 
Himself he likes it; finds, where none exist. 
Amazing qualities; and tires his limbs, 
His thought, his fancy, o'er and o'er again. 
But in the dismal watches of the night 
He knows it all delusion ; beauty none. 
Nor pleasure in it ; ennui only — eased 
By speculation on the wayside-inn, 
Or country-town hotel where lunch permits 
An hour's oblivion of his self-imposed. 
His thriftless drudgery. Despair! — And life? 
Worth picking from the gutter? No; not worth 
The stooping for! Natheless, a walker born. 
He takes the road next day; steps out once more, 
As if the world were just begun, and he, 
Sole monarch ; plods the suburb, tramps the waste- 
Again returning baffled and dismayed. 



THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD 109 

He tries a comrade. Worse and worse! — for that, 

In high pedestrlanism, turns out to be 

A double misery, a manacled 

Contingence with vexation. Walking-tours? 

Belletrists crack them up. He takes one: — lo, 

A sheer atrocity! A man may like 

To drink, but who would quench next morning's 

drouth, 
Unholy though it be, with torture forte 
Et dure in gallon draughts when by his bed 
A hair gleams of the dog that bit him! Tours 
Pedestrious? Madness, like the poet's who thought 
To write a thousand sonnets at the rate 
Of three a day! And this the tale of years! 
Forth from his travail and despair at last, 
Crash through his plodding apparatus, breaks 
The dawn of art. He recollects a mile, 
Or half a mile that pleased him; a furlong here. 
And there a hundred yards ; or an hour's march 
Over some curve of the world when everything 
Above him and about him from the zenith 
To the sky-edge, and radiant from his feet 
Toward every cardinal point put off the veil. 
Becoming evident as guilt or love, as things 
That cannot hide: — becoming him. 
And he becoming them ; and all his past 
And all his future wholly what they are. 
The very form and meaning of the earth 



no THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD 

Itself. And at these times he recollects, 
And in these places, how his thoughts were clear 
As crystal, deeper than the sea, as swift 
As light — the pulse, the bosom and the zone 
Of beauty infinite. And then and there 
Whatever he imagined took at once 
A bodily shape; and nought conceived or done 
Since life began appeared irrational, 
Wanton or needless. Since, the world and fate, 
Material functions of each other, apt 
As syllables of power and magic mind 
In some self-reading riddle, as fracted bits 
In self-adjusting instruments that play 
Unheard ethereal music of the spheres, 
Assumed their places equably; all things 
Fell duly into line and dressed their ranks. 

Thus art begins, as sudden as a star 

In some unconstellated tract of space. 

Where two extinct long-wandering orbs collide 

And smite into each other and become 

A lamp of glory, no corpuscular 

Uncertainty, no interval between 

The old misfortune and the new delight. 

And thus at once the plodder of the waste 

Attains utility and finds himself 

Aristocrat and patron of the road; 

The artizan, an artist — aristocrat 



THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE ROAD in 

And artist being over synonymes. 

All vagabondage, all bohemianism, 

All errantry, the unllcked, chrysalld 

Condition of aristocracy and art. 

Cut off for ever, the proud pedestrian free 

Of the world, walks only now in picked resorts, 

And can without a chart, without a guide, 

Discover lands richer than El Dorado, 

Sweeter than Beulah, and with ease 

Ascend secluded mountains more delectable 

Than heights in ancient pilgrimages famed, 

Or myth-clad hills, or summits of romance. 

Old traversed roads he traverses again. 

Untroubled ; nothing new he sees 

Except the stretch of pleasure-ground, like one 

Who turns the leaves o'er of a tedious book. 

Careless of verbiage to reperuse 

The single page inspired; in regions new 

He goes directly to his own like beasts 

That never miss the way; and having marked 

A province with the beauties of his choice. 

In them alone he walks, lord of the world. 



ROAD AND RAIL 

March Many-weathers, bluff and affable, 

The usher and the pursuivant of Spring, 

Had sent his North wind blaring through the 

world — 
A mundane wind that held the earth, and puffed 
The smoke of urban fire and furnace far 
Afield. An ashen canopy of cloud, 
The dense immobled sky, high-pitched above 
The wind's terrestrial office, overhung 
The city when the morning train drew out. 
Leaping along the land from town to town. 
Its iron lungs respired Its breath of steam, 
Its resonant flanges, and its vertebral 
Loose-jointed carcase of a centipede 
Gigantic, hugged and ground the parallel 
Adjusted metals of its destined way 
With apathetic fatalism, the mark 
Of all machinery. — From Paddington 
To Basingstoke the world seemed standing still: 
Nothing astir between the firmaments 
Except the aimless tumult of the wind. 
And clanging travail of the ponderous train 
In labour with its journey on the smooth, 
The ineludible, the shining rails. 

112 



ROAD AND RAIL 113 

But prompt at Basingstoke an interlude 
Began: a reckless youth, possessed with seven 
Innocuous devils of self -consciousness 
Primeval, bouncing in irruptlvely, 
Lusty-Juventus-wIse, annexed the whole 
Compartment — as a pendant to the earth. 
Already his! Wind-shaven, ruddy; hunched 
And big; all knees and knuckles; with a mouth 
That opened like a portal; fleshy chops 
And turned-up nose widespread, the signature 
Of jollity; a shapeless, elvish skull; 
His little pig's eyes in their sockets soused 
But simmering merrily; just twenty years; 
One radiation of nervous energy; 
A limber tongue and most unquenchable, 
Complacent blaze of indiscretion, soft 
As a night-light in a nursery. "Where away?" 
Quoth he; and "Hang the weather! I've seen 

worse. 
In my time, for the season." Then: Did we 

think 
The train was doing thirty or forty miles 
An hour? Sometimes, by instinct, he could tell 
To a mile the rate at which a train went. 
This morning, for a wonder, he couldn't trust 
His judgment in the matter; — annoying! — Still 
A man's form varied, and we must excuse 
His inability to gauge our speed. 



114 ROAD AND RAIL 

Good golf about here, — very! Did we play? 

And, bye the bye, talking of golf, he did 

A brilliant thing just now: — missing the train 

At Farnham on the other line, instead 

Of waiting for the next, he tramped across 

To Basingstoke, — some decent tale of miles; 

His destination being Winchester, 

Either line suited, — see? The weather, — yes, 

The weather; — healthy, of course; — your moist 

cold kills; 
Your dry cold cures; — to-day it seemed as cold, — 
But that must be the wind ; in sheltered roads 
It smelt like Spring; — to-morrow, — who could tell 
To-morrow's weather? — a funny climate, ours! 
Was that a cow there, or a — ^Yes, a cow. 
He didn't know how we regarded it. 
But he, for his part, took it that the hand 
That rocked the cradle ruled the world: to drop 
A signature into a ballot-box 
Would make no earthly! (Slang, elliptical.) 
Although we must remember, all of us, 
This rocking of the cradle was out of date; 
But that he wouldn't canvass; — we were to mind 
There must be no mistake: women were women 
All the world to nothing; and — mark him — if 
They had political enfranchisement, 
No one could say — no one at all! — what might 
And mightn't happen: not a doubt of that. 



ROAD AND RAIL 115 

Getting along more quickly; forty miles, 
He thought; or less, perhaps. He meant to lunch 
At Winchester; then hire a trap and drive . . , 
" Instanter to the devil," someone sighed. 

All this, and further, an infinitude 
Of dislocated prattle, with a smile 
Indelible, and such a negligent 
Absorbition* in self that no appeal. 
Except a sheer affront, abuse, or blow, 
Could have revealed remotely any gleam 
Or shade, to him apparent, of his own 
Insipid and grotesque enormity! 
When time, distemper or disaster sap 
Such individuals, and they see themselves, 
In facets of disrupted character, 
As others see them, stupid and absurd, 
How bad the quarter of an hour must be! 
Natheless there are extant a hearty breed, 
Incorrigibly cheerful, who behold 
Themselves for ever in the best of lights. 
And by the pipe and bowl of Old King Cole 
They have the best of it! To see ourselves 

* This word has fallen out of use; but having it we 
might employ it. Its doublet, " absorption," could be 
relegated to physics, etc., and " absorbition " kept for men- 
tal engrossment. The dictionaries lay the stress on the 
penultimate ; but in restoring '* absorbition " to the lan- 
guage, I place the main accent on the second syllable. 

J. D. 



n6 ROAD AND RAIL 

As others see us may be good enough; 
But to love others in their vanities, 
And to portray the glorious counterfeit — 
In sympathetic ink that sympathy 
Alone can read aright, — why that's a gift 
Vouchsafed to genius of the rarest strain! 

At Lyndhurst-road the coach for Lyndhurst 
took 
The turnpike at is best commercial pace. 
And there the sun burst out with moted beams 
In handfuls, clenched like sheaves of thunderbolts. 
The riven clouds, of homespun slashed and gored. 
Displayed through unhemmed slits the turquoise 

sky, — 
As tender as a damsel's bosom-thoughts. 
Across the forest's swarthy-purple ridge 
A sparse shower twinkled ; but the broken bulk 
Of vapour, by the sunbeams bundled up, 
Slipped o'er the sky-edge and was no more seen. 
Like a lithe weapon by gigantic hands 
In pastance wielded, keen the brandished wind 
Whistled about us all the uphill way 
To Lyndhurst, where a lofty church o'erlooks 
The forest's metes and bounds, its modish spire 
A landmark far and wide. But in the glebes 
And garden-closes ancient houses — thatched, 
Of post-and-panel, and with arching eaves 



ROAD AND RAIL 117 

About their high and deep-set windows — peer 

Occultly out of many centuries. 

An old-world use and wont, the neighbourhood 

And venue of the place are everywhere 

Presumptive, — in the High Street, new and raw, 

As in the sylvan faubourgs; for a gust 

Of burning log and faggot importunes 

The passer-by — the forest's bitter-sweet 

Aroma, as it turns to genial warmth 

And toothsome savour for the villager. 



SONG FOR THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF 

MAY 



The character and strength of us 

Who conquer everywhere, 
We sing the English of it thus, 
And bid the world beware; 
We bid the world beware 
The perfect heart and will, 

That dare the utmost men may dare 
And follow freedom still. 

Sea-room, land-room, ours, my masters, ours, 
Hand in hand with destiny, and first among 

the Powers ! 
Our boasted Ocean Empire, sirs, we boast of 

it again. 
Our Monarch, and our Rulers, and our 
Women, and our Men! 

n 

The pillars of our Empire stand 

In unforgotten graves; 
We built dominion on the land. 

And greatness on the waves; 

ii8 



SONG FOR THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF MAY 119 

Our Empire on the waves, 
Established firm and sure, 

And founded deep in ocean's caves 
While honour shall endure. 

Sea-room, land-room, honourably ours. 
Hand in hand with destiny, and first among 

the Powers! 
Our boasted Ocean Empire, sirs, we boast of 

it again. 
Our ancient Isles, our Lands afar, and all 
our loyal Men! 

m 

Our flag, on every wind unfurled, 

Proclaims from sea to sea 
A future and a nobler world 
Where men and thoughts are free; 
Our men, our thoughts are free; 
Our wars are waged for peace; 
We stand in arms for liberty 
Till bonds and bondage cease. 

Sea-room, land-room, ours, appointed ours. 
Conscious of our calling and the first among 

the Powers! 
Our boasted Ocean Sovereignty, again and 

yet again! 
Our Counsel, and our Conduct, and our Arm- 
aments and Men! 



JUN 3 m9 





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